On the morning of October 24, 2021, a Falcon 9 launch vehicle with the DRAT space probe launched from a military spaceport in California, which will crash into an asteroid to test technology for protecting the Earth from collisions with space objects.
The DART project was developed by NASA together with the European Space Agency as part of a program to protect the Earth from planetary impacts.
The rocket is heading towards the near-Earth asteroid Dimorph, 150 m in diameter, which orbits the larger Didyma asteroid and poses no danger to Earth. The probe will hit the asteroid 10 months after launch, it weighs 633 kg. and must crash into the asteroid at a speed of about 24 thousand km/h in order to change the trajectory of its movement.
The asteroids Dimorph and Didyma were discovered back in 2016; in five years they are already approaching the Earth for the second or third time, and are not included in the database of potentially dangerous objects.
At the same time, NASA Deputy Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said that none of the asteroids known to specialists threaten to collide with the Earth in the next 100 years.