{"id":16209,"date":"2019-04-16T20:13:04","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T03:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=16209"},"modified":"2019-04-16T20:13:04","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T03:13:04","slug":"spacex-wins-nasa-contract-to-fly-craft-into-asteroid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=16209","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX wins NASA contract to fly craft into asteroid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Elon Musk&#8217;s SpaceX has been awarded a $69 million contract for a mission that will include flying a spacecraft into an asteroid.<\/p>\n<p>NASA last week awarded the contract to SpaceX, selecting the company to provide services for NASA&#8217;s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, NASA said in a statement.<\/p>\n<p>The current target date for the mission is June 2021, and NASA plans to use one of SpaceX&#8217;s Falcon 9 rockets, the agency said.<\/p>\n<p>With the mission, NASA will look to &#8220;demonstrate a kinetic impact&#8221; by deliberately flying a spacecraft into a small asteroid, according to a description of the project on NASA&#8217;s website.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6 km\/s, with the aid of an onboard camera and sophisticated autonomous navigation software,&#8221; the website reads.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, enough to be measured using telescopes on Earth.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Elon Musk&#8217;s SpaceX has been awarded&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-science-tech","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16210,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16209\/revisions\/16210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}