NASA is going to advertize ahead with its part of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment ( AIDA ) delegacy , despite its married person – ESA – effectively pulling out of the mission earlier this calendar month .

The innovative AIDA mission would have seen an ESA - ramp up ballistic capsule , the Asteroid Impact Mission ( AIM ) , launch towards an asteroid called Didymos in October 2020 . Then , in October 2022 , a NASA - physical body ballistic capsule called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test ( DART ) would have slammed into a small moonlet of the asteroid , shout Didymoon , and AIM would have observe changes in the moonlet ’s orbit .

unluckily , on December 2 , ESA ’s Ministerial Council elected toscrap fundingfor AIM , in favor of expend money on the 2020 ExoMars bird of passage and the International Space Station ( ISS ) , among other projects . This left the fortune of the whole project in uncertainty .

But verbalise last calendar week at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union ( AGU ) in San Francisco , several scientists say that NASA was continuing with its part of the mission for now , without ESA ’s help . And DART could still be wing , with the changes in the orbit of Didymoon observed by Earth - based telescope alternatively .

“ DART was designed to be sovereign of AIM , ” said Joseph Nuth , aged scientist for primitive body at NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center , reportedSpaceNews . “ AIM reach it better , but all the information can be derived from ground - based instruments . ”

A decision by NASA is not expected to be made until March 2017 . But if DART can work independently , then the mission can hopefully go forward .

Aside from the plain cool view of thrash a ballistic capsule into an asteroid , the mission would prove hugely useful in saving Earth from asteroid in the future . The variety in orbit of Didymoon from DART is expected to be tiny , in the order of inches . But if an asteroid was one day retrieve to be on a collision course with Earth , a descale up version could be enough to deflect it off from our planet .

“ An asteroid impact is the only natural disaster we know how to prevent if we work together towards a global answer , ” Grigorij Richters , co - founder of theAsteroid Day movement , told IFLScience earlier this month . “ We are all crew of Spaceship Earth . ”