Nasa and the European Space Agency want to join forces to defend the planet from possible asteroid strikes
“This is the kind of disaster that could be a tremendous catastrophe,” Andrew Cheng from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, told AFP at a European Planetary Science Congress in Riga.
Cheng is the project scientist for the American part of the AIDA mission, named Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which has been approved but still needs final confirmation.
DART wants to hurl a spacecraft into the tiny moon of a faraway asteroid dubbed Didymos to change its path – a scientific first.
The European Space Agency initially said it would play a part, sending a small ship close to the action to measure the crash and its impact.
But it suffered a setback when space ministers rejected a £220million funding request last December.
Fears over potentially deadly asteroids are at a high after the White House issued an “emergency defence plan” in the event of a collision late last year.
