A cosmic collision and it's all caught on camera.
NASA intentionally tried to nudge a harmless asteroid that is about seven million miles away from Earth on Monday.
It's kind of like a bug on a windshield but in this case, NASA scientists are hoping a spacecraft traveling 14,000 miles per hour will crash into the space rock and push it slightly off course.
The purpose of the unprecedented test is to see if it would work in the event an asteroid was really going to hit the Earth.
RELATED CONTENT: NASA DART craft successfully hits asteroid, could help defend Earth against future impact
We won't know if it worked for a couple of days or weeks. TMJ4 talked with cosmos expert Dr. Jean Creighton. Dr. Creighton is the director of the UWM Planetarium. It is a part of a new 10 p.m. segment called @the Table with Shannon Sims and Charles Benson.
Benson asked, "So quite the galactic experiment. Why did we do this and what can we learn from it?"
Dr. Creighton responded, "We want to have choices. There are about 25,000 objects in the solar system that are considered near-Earth objects, okay? That means they get within 10% of the distance between the Earth and the sun. That's close. And if they are big, let's say several times a football field, they could take out life on Earth, and wow, yes, now they're variations, right? Some of these asteroids can be as small as a house. Some of them can be as big as Texas."
Sims said, "Hopefully the (Texas-sized asteroid) isn't going to hit us because then probably we don't have any tools for it or any choices."
Benson added, "And this one wasn't going to hit us. We knew this one wasn't going to hit."
Dr Creighton responded, "The hope is that since we are tracking about 150 objects that we consider potentially hazardous that if we see this one, this one, this could hit us in 30 years. Some small interventions like what we did today might help us miss it by 1,000 miles."
Sims asked, "So how much calculation needs to be thought of to worry whether or not an asteroid will really crash into Earth?"
Dr Creighton answered, "We have an uncertainty of exactly what its orbit is. And the more data we collect, the better we narrow that. So, the point is, if we see something that we think looks a little too close, we would start tracking it closely. And then we would say, 'okay, that guy we need to do something about.'"
For more information on the UWM Planetarium,visit UW-Milwaukee's website.
