China plans to crash a spacecraft into a distant asteroid
It will be only the second country to conduct such a planetary defence experiment
SPACE ROCKS collide with Earth’s atmosphere all the time. The vast majority are too small to do any damage, but the risk of a larger asteroid (or comet) wiping out a city is one that space agencies around the world are taking seriously. The first goal of such would-be planetary defenders is detection: finding all objects capable of wreaking such damage and confirming that they are not on a collision course with Earth. The other goal is testing technologies that could either destroy such asteroids or else, more plausibly, deflect them away from the planet.
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