China Plans Planetary Defense Test By Slamming Mach 26 Spacecraft Into Asteroid A new paper under peer review by the Chinese-language Journal of Deep Space Exploration lays out an ambitious plan to crash a spacecraft at Mach 26, or 20,000 mph, into a near-Earth asteroid to test new planetary defenses. The South China Morning Post reports that a team led by Li Mingtao, chief scientist for planetary defense at the China National Space Administration, is planning a mission even more ambitious than NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). That mission would slam a spacecraft into 2015 XF261, an asteroid estimated… — Continue at ZeroHedge News : Read More
