NASA Is About To Play Real Life Asteroids
Asteroids the game launched in 1979 and in 2021 Nasa has launched a spacecraft designed to knock a real-life asteroid off its course.
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Asteroids is a classic game and was one of the first big hits in the video game arcades of the early 1980s. It is a little hard to imagine but this 2D shooter, with its minimal graphics, could’ve been such a draw once upon a time. But even with its black and white colours and simple vector lines, the physics remain compelling and the basic premise of destroying asteroids with one’s spaceship (a white triangle) holds up suprisingly well in the twenty-first century.
Designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, the game launched in November 1979 on an Atari arcade cabinet and would later be ported to the landmark home console, the Atari 2600. Despite the seemingly simple appearance of Asteroids, a lot of thought and work actually went into its design, with details such as the spaceship’s thrust and inertia, and the control scheme, being laboured over. The physics of games such as Asteroids and its influences – Spacewar!; Space Invaders – were calculations that early game designers spent a lot of time on. Another bunch of people that also spend a lot of time considering space physics is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – otherwise known as NASA.
Nasa is about to play a real life version of the video game – only its way of dealing with an asteroid will not involve missiles fired from a spaceship. Instead, Nasa are firing a spacecraft directly into an asteroid. The mission is known as Dart – or Double Asteroid Redirection Test – and is intended to see whether Nasa can redirect the trajectory of an asteroid in the hope that one day we can nudge the path of a rock headed for Earth.
“It’s an intentional crash of a spacecraft into a rock. What we’re trying to learn is how to deflect a threat,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate of NASA’s science mission directorate, in a press conference on Monday. The asteroid in question is named Didymos, and is in fact a double asteroid, with one small rock orbiting a larger asteroid ‘sibling’. Didymos poses no threat to Earth and the mission is only a test to see if slamming into the smaller rock can knock it off its trajectory. Even a small change in direction can have a big impact, however, due to the massive distances in space, meaning only a slight deviation in course could potentially alter an asteroid’s path from Earth, for example.
DART launched on 10.20pm US pacific time onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vanderberg Space Force Base in California and is expected to reach Didymos sometime in September 2022. Shortly after its impact, scientists should be able to learn whether their mission was a success or not.
Asteroids, the game meanwhile, is now a little less science fiction.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/nasa-dart-real-life-asteroids/