NASA Plans to Crash into an Asteroid

For the first time ever, NASA is going to smash a space craft into an asteroid on purpose. They want to see if it is possible to protect the earth from cataclysmic collisions.

Tom Statler, a programme scientist at Nasa, said, “We certainly hope that we will never have to deploy an asteroid deflector, but we want to do the test now.”

According to The Telegraph, “the asteroid being targeted is not threatening Earth but, if successful, it will be the first time humans have altered the path of a non-Earth object in the solar system.” NASA hopes to “avoid a mass extinction event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and most life on Earth, 66 million years ago.”

It’s a mammoth task ahead of them. Read more about it here: telegraph.co.uk.