Could This NASA Technology One Day Save Humanity?

Last September, equipped with a state-of-the-art imaging system that worked with a set of targeting, guidance, navigation, and control algorithms, NASA’s DART spacecraft autonomously identified and distinguished between two asteroids, targeted the body headed toward Earth, and crashed into it.

Transcript

00:00:00 Earth is surrounded by asteroids. Most of them are  no threat to us, but some are potentially hazardous.   In 2021 NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied  Physics Laboratory launched the Double Asteroid   Redirection Test with the goal of smashing a  spacecraft into an asteroid to change its orbit.   The purpose of DART is to demonstrate that we  can protect the Earth from impacts from natural   objects. Imagine we discover an asteroid that  is coming towards Earth. Even giving it a small   nudge years in advance will allow it to change  it's course sufficiently that it misses Earth.   DART would spend 10 months traveling  to its final destination, the moonlit   asteroid Dimorphos, using autonomous SMARTNav technology. And at about two and a half minutes out we ceased all maneuvering and we coast until we hit the asteroid.

00:01:12 Two weeks ago NASA made history once again, and  now the team has confirmed that the spacecraft's   impact altered Dimorphos' orbit around  Didymos by 32 minutes. For the first time ever Humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary  body. The tail is spectacular and this amount   of ejecta that you're seeing and it's continually  evolving. The observations are going on in order to   fully track and watch that evolution. It really  is just the beginning of the analysis of this   tremendously rich data set. And it's very exciting  to be in this position to be doing this now.