NASA is trying to move a asteroid.

At some point, an asteroid or meteorite will impact the earth and no, and this is not the plot of a movie, this is something that is known for sure that is why NASA has carried out the DART mission with the aim of colliding at high speed against an asteroid and deflect its trajectory.

Yes, Bruce Willis would be proud. The actor in the movie Armageddon movie carries out a suicide mission to prevent an asteroid from colliding with the earth, to do nothing more and nothing less than explode a nuclear bomb in space. Well, it turns out that this science fiction movie is not as much science fiction as we thought, and it is that a few days ago, NASA launched the DART spacecraft that precisely has the mission of impacting at high speed with an asteroid to evaluate if that impact changes the trajectory of the same sufficiently. The mission has been in the works for years and was made possible by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

DART is on a mission to hit Dimorphos with an asteroid the size of a football field orbiting another asteroid called Didymos, and don't worry that these two asteroids pose no danger to our planet. This is only a test; NASA foresees that DART collides with Dimorphos in September or early October 2022. By then, there will be a satellite of the Italian state agency that takes photos of the moment of impact. Also, according to NASA forecasts, the effect would cause the orbit of Dimorphos to lengthen between 10 and 20 minutes.

The truth is that they are pretty encouraging figures because for the mission to be a complete success, only 73 seconds would suffice. And although we have said that this is only a test, it means that, in the hypothetical case that such an asteroid was in the direction of the earth, it would deviate and pass it by. Everything indicates that we will have guaranteed success and if so, this mission would mean that we would indeed have a solution if a meteorite gets dangerously close to the earth in the future. With the latter, the scenario posed at Armageddon of using a nuclear bomb is not ruled out.

Although there is indeed an international agreement not to use atomic bombs in space in an extreme situation, the UN could disable that treaty to use a nuclear explosion to minimize the threat and what could be an extreme situation. For example, the threat was detected with too little time and room for maneuver or that the asteroid was too giant. This is known to be a very ambitious proposal. We will have to see what the future holds for us.