We in the Kill Cliff Community enjoy mind-blowing cool things. This week saw several very cool things happen, and in case you missed them, or missed why they are so cool, we’ll fill you in.
NASA Hit an Asteroid Moonlet With a Spaceship
Coolness factor: 100%!
The baby asteroid Dimorphos actually ORBITS a larger asteroid (space is wild, man) called Didymos. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spaceship launched in November and went around the Sun for 10 months before doing a kamikaze crash into Dimorphos, which is about the size of a stadium.
It’s also seven million miles away. That’s 7,000,000. Miles. Away.
And the thing hit the rock traveling 14,000-miles-an-hour (!) and hit it not just about the time the engineers in suburban Washington, D.C., said it would a year earlier, but it hit it to the 10th of a second.
The idea is to see if we can successfully, you know, SAVE THE WORLD if an asteroid seems to be coming at us by nailing it with a rocket and diverting it into space. Of course, the DART camera (the internet, man, another cool thing) was destroyed on impact. BUT telescopes on Earth—seven million miles away, remember—did catch the fateful moment of the crash.
There’s a Flying Saucer on a Government Logo
Speaking of space, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—ODNI, the agency that collects intelligence from other agencies and does something with it—unveiled a new logo for one of their departments.
It’s got a weird thing on it.
The ODNI NIM-Aviation unit’s logo shows some silhouettes of aircraft, a drone, an airliner, a combat jet…
And a flying saucer.
The government is really getting interested in what they call Unidentified Ariel Phenomena.
