US space agency NASA has announced the opening of media accreditation for the upcoming launch of their Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.
The launch is expected to take place on 23 November at 10:20 pm (PST) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, with the NASA spacecraft to be propelled into space via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission is supposed to become the first demonstration of the “kinetic impactor technique”, which, according to a NASA press release, “involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an asteroid in space to change its motion”.
Didymos, a binary asteroid and a near-Earth object, is supposed to become the target of this endeavour.
The goal of the NASA’s mission is to evaluate technologies that may be employed in the future to prevent potentially hazardous asteroids from colliding with our planet.