The Dart Mission and Deflecting Asteroids

The recent Dart mission to send a craft to impact the Didymus B asteroid to deflect it seems to be a success, but the true results before the effects of doing this are known. Before the congratulations and hailing the success of the mission guaranteeing the people of earth a safe passage, we may need to consider the problem of timing and scale.

The asteroid that contributed to wiping out of the dinosaurs and causing the Chicxulub crater was a little bit bigger is mass, around 125 billion times and many of the world’s astromomers are missing as many potential near earth or earth grazing objects until a few days or week before, possibly as many as 50% in this time frame. There was a lot of planning and about 6 months travel time going into the Dart project, so although  it being a proof of concept it would possibly need to be scaled up to a similar difference between a home firework and the Hiroshima atomic explosion if a similar one were to arrive and may need to year to implement.