‘We can do this if we need’: DART mission proves asteroid detonation is possible

ANU astrophysicist and cosmologist Dr Brad Tucker says the DART mission to blow up an asteroid comes from asking “what can we do to defend the Earth” if need be. “Instead of waiting for the fight to come to us, we took the fight to the asteroid,” he told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “We’re going to see, can we do it?” Dr Tucker said there were “a number of things” in the DART mission which were of concern, such as reaching the target, which is 11 million kilometres away, and hitting it with the rocket. “That’s actually harder than it may seem – there’s two asteroids next to each other,” he said. “From a distance, you can only see one of them, so you have to find the right one and you have to auto-navigate onto the right one and centre it up. “You can’t fly it in real time because of the communication delay so it all has to be computer programmed and learning on the fly where to line up and then it has to hit the centre.”