Cosmic Crash 2022: Scientists Plan To Smash Into An Asteroid To See What's Inside

A group of international scientists are making furthering their plans for the 2022 Cosmic Crash in which they will intentionally collide a spacecraft with an asteroid in an attempt to see what the inside of it looks like.

The Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment mission (AIDA) is led by a team of European scientists who have announced they are starting preparations for the launch planned in 2019. They will send to different spacecrafts hurtling towards the Didymos asteroid, one built in Europe by the European Space Agency, and the other built in the US by a team at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

The scientists involved in the mission recently presented their plans for the cosmic crash 2022 at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last week.

The American team is building DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) which, as the name suggests, will crash into the space rock creating a crater and hopefully setting it off course. While Didymos is not itself on a course to crash into Earth, the experiment seeks to test theories that could later be applied to asteroids that do pose a threat to life on this planet.

The Asteroid Impact Monitor (AIM) is being built by the European team and will observe the cosmic crash from afar, taking measurements and sending data back to the lab.

When DART collides with the asteroid, scientists will be able to understand its composition and also have a better understanding of how it will move through space post cosmic crash. The data will also help researchers better understand other conditions surrounding asteroids in preparation for NASA's planned mission to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025.

The AIM spacecraft is expected to cost around $194 million while DART is estimated at about $150 million.