SpaceX, NASA Partner On Asteroid Defense Mission

Elon Musk-led SpaceX will collaborate with the U.S space agency NASA to launch an asteroid defense mission called Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

In a Twitter post, the CEO shared his excitement about the mission and also called it Armageddon 69, in which 69 presumably stands for the $69 million NASA will pay to Space X for the project.

According to NASA, Dart will intercept the asteroid Didymos’ small moon in October 2022 when the asteroid is within 11 million kilometers of Earth. The first of its kind project is recognition for SpaceX.

Per NASA news, SpaceX was selected in April by the agency to provide the launch services for the asteroid mission named Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

The DART mission will deliver $69 million to SpaceX in terms of launch service fees and other mission-related costs, per SpaceX news.

Dart is a sub-category of the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) project jointly partnered by NASA and European space agency ESA as they planned to target Didymos.

But NASA accorded priority to the impactor portion of the mission as a test whether a spacecraft could hit and deflect an asteroid on a collision course with earth.

Dart will be the first mission involving a spacecraft that will intentionally target an asteroid using a technique called kinetic impactor.

SpaceX Falcon 9 to launch asteroid mission

The Dart mission will be launched in June 2021 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center will oversee the SpaceX launch service.

Asteroids are small rocky objects that orbit the Sun. The solar system consists of lots of asteroids and a bulk of them inhabit the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroids are vestiges or leftover from the solar system originated 4.6 billion years ago.

Among the asteroids, Bennu Asteroid is quite famous. It was named after Bennu, an Egyptian mythological bird associated with the Sun and rebirth.

The carbonaceous asteroid was discovered in 1999 and considered a hazardous object with a huge probability of falling on Earth in the next millennium.

Meanwhile, the reference of Elon Musk to Armageddon in the tweet is significant as the movie also revolves around the theme of stopping an asteroid.

The 1998 American blockbuster was directed by Michael Bay and it portrayed a group of NASA technicians on a mission to stop a huge asteroid that was about to fall on Earth.