NASA is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to test a plan that could one day save Earth from catastrophe

The DART mission will be the first-ever attempt to deflect a large asteroid. But this will not be the first time humanity has sent something to an asteroid. NASA’s Deep Space Impact mission crashed a probe into the comet 9P/Tempel in 2005 to take scientific measurements of the comet, and in 2018 Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission collected samples from the asteroid Ryugu and brought them back to Earth, but neither of these was designed as a planetary defense test.

The DART mission should generate a lot of useful information. This data will come from a camera aboard the DART spacecraft that will send images back to Earth up until the time of impact. In addition, a tiny satellite called LICIACube that was deployed from DART on Sept. 11, 2022, will take photos of the impact. A follow-up mission from the European Space Agency, called Hera, will launch in 2024 and rendezvous with Didymos in 2026 to begin collecting data.

In 2021, NASA’s planetary defense budget was $158 million, just 0.7% of NASA’s total budget and 0.02% of the roughly $700 billion U.S. defense budget.

Is this the right amount to invest in monitoring the skies, given the fact that some 60% of all potentially dangerous asteroids remain undetected? This is an important question to ask when one considers the potential consequences.

Investing in planetary defense is akin to buying homeowners insurance. The likelihood of experiencing an event that destroys your house is small, yet people buy insurance nonetheless.

If even a single object larger than 460 feet (140 meters) hits the planet, the devastation and loss of life would be extreme. A bigger impact could quite literally wipe out most species on Earth. Even if no such body is expected to hit Earth in the next 100 years, the chance is not zero. In this low-likelihood-versus-high-consequences scenario, investing in protecting the planet from dangerous cosmic objects may give humanity some peace of mind and could prevent a catastrophe.

This is an updated version of a story originally published on March 1, 2022.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Svetla Ben-Itzhak, Air University. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Defense, or of any organization the author is affiliated with, including the Air University, Air War College, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force.