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Ammon News - "NASA" granted the director of the International Astronomy Center, the Jordanian engineer, Muhammad Shawkat Odeh, a certificate of participation in the experiment to change the course of an asteroid and prevent it from colliding with Earth.

Odeh said on Monday, that this certificate was granted by NASA, in preparation for its mission, two days later, to colliding its probe with one of the binary asteroids, to study how to protect the Earth from an asteroid collision with it, by sending a probe that changes the path of the asteroid, in a mission called: “Dart” or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, where the probe was launched on board a space rocket on November 24 last year, heading to an asteroid called "Dimorphos".


He added that the observatory will participate in analyzing the results of the collision, as scientists will conduct an experiment at dawn tomorrow, Tuesday, to change the course of an asteroid, to study the effectiveness of changing the path of an asteroid that will collide with Earth and pose a danger to it.

This asteroid does not pose any danger to Earth, but was chosen for astronomical considerations, including that it is easy to monitor by ground telescopes after the collision, and if this experiment is successful, this technology becomes one of the solutions to confront a dangerous asteroid heading towards Earth according to what Odeh said.

The Director of the International Astronomy Center confirmed that scientists will need several days or weeks after the collision to monitor and study the movement of the new small asteroid to know the success of the experiment or not.

Adding that the International Astronomy Center communicated with the supervisor of this mission, so that the Astronomical Seal Observatory will be one of the global observatories that participate in the photometric analysis of the asteroid after the collision to assess the success of the experiment, and the observatory's participation was accepted as one of the participating observatories from the UAE.

He pointed out that the observatory will monitor the asteroid at the moment of collision, in addition to making photometric observations after that and sharing them with the mission supervisors, and the collision can be followed live on NASA TV.