The U.S.-European Asteroid Deflection & Assessment Practice Plans To Prepare The Earth For A Possible Massive Asteroid Impact In The Future

Scientists plan to send two spacecraft to bump an 525-foot egg-shaped rock called Didymoon off its course in space as part of the U.S.-European Asteroid Deflection & Assessment (Aida) Practice that aims to prepare the Earth for a possible massive asteroid impact that may wipe out civilizations in the future.

According to The Independent on Thursday, Didymoon may be small and harmless to Earth, but scientists wish to test on a smaller scale whether their proposed concept could actually work.

The Asteroid Deflection & Assessment Practice missions are targeted to be launched in October 2020 and is expected to come in contact with Didymoon by May 2022.

Fortune noted on Wednesday that the Asteroid Deflection & Assessment Practice is composed of two "sub-missions."

The first half is sending a spacecraft, part of the European Space Agency's Asteroid Impact Mission (Aim), that will orbit Didymoon to observe the effect of NASA's Dart mission, measure the asteroid's mass and density and place a small lander on the asteroid to view its internal components.

The second half is NASA's launch of a spacecraft for their Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission, which will shoot a probe to crash into the rock in hopes of throwing it off course.

"To protect Earth from potentially hazardous impacts, we need to understand asteroids much better - what they are made of, their structure, origins and how they respond to collisions," noted Dr Patrick Michel, the lead investigator for the European Space Agency half of the mission.

"Aida will be the first mission to study an asteroid binary system, as well as the first to test whether we can deflect an asteroid through an impact with a spacecraft," he added. "The European part of the mission... will study the structure of Didymoon and the orbit and rotation of the binary system, providing clues to its origin and evolution."