Elon Musk Wants to "Avenge the Dinosaurs" With NASA DART Mission

Elon Musk is demanding payback for the extinction of dinosaurs as he cheers for the NASA DART mission on Twitter.

NASA DART is a space mission about Earth's planetary defense mechanism. The plan is for a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid in an attempt to knock it off trajectory.

Last week, NASA launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) aboard SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Many space fans monitored this exciting event because it is the first proof-of-concept experiment for the "kinetic impactor" technique. NASA tweeted an overview of the mission.

Elon Musk Tweets "Avenge the Dinosaurs"

Hours after the launch, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk showed his full support for the DART mission. He tweeted a funny comment to "avenge the dinosaurs!!" on his social media page, which received 20,900 retweets, 1,455 quote tweets, and 203,100 likes at the time of writing.

Attached to Musk's tweet was a NASA Asteroid Watch update about NASA DART. This tweet included a fantastic photo of DART during its launch.

Interested fans can watch the full NASA DART launch on this article. The link also includes a NASA token called "DARTmission board," where fans can practice shooting down their own asteroid.

NASA DART: The Mission to Stop Interstellar Threats

As previously mentioned, the DART mission is a project to set up Earth's planetary defense mechanism against the dangerous situation of "what if an asteroid hits Earth?" Space Camp Turkey explained that there are thousands of asteroids or space debris around the planet, and most of them usually shatter on Jupiter's humongous surface. However, there are a few bits that could fall on Earth.

In the worst-case scenario, an impact of an asteroid is proportionate to its size. An asteroid a few meters in size usually burns up as a fireball in the atmosphere. If an asteroid is the size of a regular apartment, it can destroy a small city. Lastly, if an asteroid is the size of a 20-storey building, it can completely flatten a small country.

Asteroids occasionally hit Earth, and there are a few places that bear traces of them. Notably, asteroids that can cause the same devastation as the extinction of dinosaurs happen once every billion years.

Elon Musk Speaks on "Greatest Filter"

For Musk, the NASA DART mission is definitely one step forward to human technological development towards space. He even discussed it in detail with a fan. Together, they talked about humans going interstellar by traveling to Mars.

Musk believes that asteroids will soon come on Earth, so it's best to prepare countermeasures against it.

Full details his options and tweets about DART and Mars conquest are available in this article.