Look up: NASA was able to change the course of an asteroid orbiting Earth. Here's what psychology and economics had to do with our ability to prevent future danger, by LPBetterWorld
The DART mission provides a basis for supposing that, with enough warning, humans may soon be able to thwart potential collisions with asteroids.The DART team’s apparent sense of pride may demonstrate how people are still driven by their nature as social animals.A month ago, a spacecraft launched by NASA 10 months earlier collided with an asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos.
Putting it in perspective, we can say that about 66 million years after an asteroid strike caused the extinction of most macroscopic life forms on Earth and cleared the way for the evolution of diverse new species including our own, NASA and its partners at Johns Hopkins University had succeeded in calculating the routes of both an asteroid and a human-constructed projectile so as to achieve a perfect head-on.
What about larger chunks of space rock, impacts with which could prove even more catastrophic to the Earth and its inhabitants? Remarkably, NASA scientists say they’ve already surveyed the solar system sufficiently to rule out such collisions for the foreseeable future, allowing the agency and its partners to focus on smaller asteroids like Dimorphos.
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