Nasa tests planetary defence with asteroid crash
Artwork: Dart's navigation system first had to distinguish the smaller rock from the larger one
More than two dozen telescopes on Earth will make precise measurements of the two-rock, or binary, system. "This technique, called the 'kinetic impactor technique' could be used if there were to be an asteroid that was incoming at some point in the future. It's a very simple idea: you ram the spacecraft into the object you're worried about, and you use the mass and the speed of your spacecraft to slightly change the orbit of that object enough so that it would miss the Earth instead of hitting the Earth.
"An analogy is if you're wearing a wristwatch and you damage it, and it starts running fast by a little bit," explained Dart mission scientist Dr Nancy Chabot, also from JHU-APL. "You might not notice the error in the first day or two, but after a few weeks you will begin to notice that the watch is just not keeping correct time anymore. It's running fast; it's ahead of where it should be.
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