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Tomorrow (27th), the first ever space experiment in which an unmanned spacecraft deliberately collides with an asteroid will be conducted.
This is to protect the Earth from many nearby asteroids, reports Junmo Moon.
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In November of last year, NASA launched an unmanned experimental spacecraft 'Dart' from Vandenberg Station in California.
Dart approached the asteroid 'Dimorphos' about 11 million km away from Earth after more than 10 months of flight, and at 8:14 am Korean time tomorrow, at a speed of 22,000 km per hour, It crashes.
The size of Dimorphus is 160m in diameter and weighs at least 8 million times that of a dart spaceship.
Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos, which, if successful, is expected to shorten its orbit by a few minutes as its orbit becomes smaller inward.
[Tom Statler / NASA 'Dart' Program Manager: Dimorphos is a very small planet.
I've never seen it up close and I don't know what it looks like.
It is very difficult to collide (dart) with such an asteroid.]
If the collision fails tomorrow, Dart will switch to fuel-saving mode and try again two years later.
The collision will be photographed by a subsequent micro-satellite and transmitted tomorrow, but it will take at least a few weeks to determine if the orbit has been corrected.
There are 2,200 asteroids classified as potentially dangerous because they approached within 7.5 million km of Earth, but it is estimated that there are about 15,000 near-Earth asteroids that have not yet been discovered.
(Video editing: Ho-Jin Kim, CG: Jong-Jeong Lee)