The NASA mission (which was also attended by the Italian Space Agency) for deflect an asteroid, DARTwas successful and Google celebrates with a special animationAnd. In fact, by searching for “DART” in Google search, you will have a truly original surprise.
Google celebrates the DART mission in searches
You can search for “DART”, “NASA DART” or “Mission DART”, in all languages of the world. The result does not change: Google opens a page where it shows the latest news on the mission. And then he brings one spaceship that crashes into the box with information on the NASA missiondoing iTilt all search results to the right.
The animation reflects what NASA and other space agencies really did tonight. The DART spacecraft indeed traveled to 22.5 thousand kilometers then towards the small asteroid Dimorphos, crashing at full speed. The goal is to understand how the trajectory and speed of the celestial body changes.
The asteroid Dimorphos, framed by DART before the collision
The asteroid, currently located at circseven million miles from us, it does not pose any risk to the Earth. This is just an experiment, to be ready in case it ever serves to really deflect a sufficiently large asteroid on a collision course with Earth. A first step towards a planetary defense system.
Over the next couple of months, scientists will evaluate how Dimorphos’ race in space changes. Also thanks to Italian LICIACube probe released by DART before the crash. And new experiments will likely follow, to be ready to defend ourselves from space threats.
Google often celebrates important events with animations on the search page (we remember when it removed half of the results to celebrate the release of Avengers: Endgame with a snap of Thanos fingers). But this time we have to say that the animation is really perfect, even if it forced us to keep there bent head as we checked Dimorphos’ spelling.