Former NASA lunar module pilot Rusty Schweickart, who took part in the 1969 mission, has recalled a shocking close encounter – with an asteroid. The 84-year-old detailed how the team saw the incredible spectacle burning below them.
He said: ”During the Apollo 9 mission we were dark-adapted for an experiment, looking at the spectacular night-time Earth, watching weather fronts, thunderstorms and lightning, a really great sight out of the window.
“Then, who knows who said it first, but one of us said they saw a little flash down there and someone else says ‘yeah, I saw it too,’ but you wouldn’t have mentioned it if the first person hadn’t said it.
“And then we realised: that was a meteor, burning up below us.
“Wow, below us – which meant it came down through our altitude!”
He ascribes his current interest in planetary defence to the recent rise of astrobiology.
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How can the planet be protected against an asteroid strike?
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are participated in a combined endeavour called the Asteroid Impact Deflection Assessment (AIDA).
The purpose of AIDA is to deflect the orbit of the smaller body of the double Didymos asteroids between Earth and Mars through an impact by one spacecraft.
A second spacecraft will then survey the crash site to gather data about this collision’s effect.
NASA’s contribution to AIDA, the Double Asteroid Impact Test (DART), is already under construction for launch in summer 2021, to collide with its target at 14,764mph (23,760kmh) in September 2022.
Accompanying DART will be an Italian-made miniature CubeSat called Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) to record the moment of impact.
Then will come ESA’s part of AIDA, a mission called Hera which will perform a close-up survey of the post-impact asteroid, acquiring measurements such as the asteroid’s mass and detailed crater shape.
Hera will also deploy two CubeSats for close-up asteroid surveys and the very first radar probe of an asteroid.
The results returned by Hera will help scientists better understand the efficiency of the asteroid collision, to fine-tune this experiment into a technique to be repeated as needed in the event of a real asteroid threat.
