Washington, (AFP) - The US space agency " NASA " announced that it had succeeded in deflecting an asteroid, in a historic test of the human ability to prevent a celestial body from destroying life on Earth.

The agency's chief Bill Nelson said that the "Double Asteroid Reorientation Test" vehicle (DART), which is the size of a refrigerator, deliberately collided with the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26th and pushed it into a smaller, faster orbit around another, larger asteroid called Didymus.

"This is a defining moment in defending the planet and a defining moment for humanity," Nelson stressed, stressing that NASA "has proven that we are serious in our defense of the Earth."

Nelson explained that the double asteroid reorientation test "reduced the orbital period from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes."

Dimorphos needed 11 hours and 55 minutes to make a complete orbit around Didymus.

He added, "We would have considered that we had achieved great success if the spacecraft was satisfied with reducing the orbital period by about ten minutes, but it reduced it by 32 minutes."

And Dimorphos, with a diameter of about 160 meters, poses no danger to Earth.

"It's like a movie script, but we're not in Hollywood," Nelson said. "This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for anything the universe might send us."

And if its goal was modest compared to the scenarios of a number of science fiction films such as "Armageddon", then this unprecedented test mission inaugurates the era of training in the way humanity defends itself if life on Earth is threatened by an asteroid in the future.

To verify that the asteroid's trajectory had changed, scientists needed to analyze data provided by telescopes on Earth.

These telescopes detected a change in the asteroid's flash when it passed in front of and behind the larger asteroid.

Immediately after the collision, the first scenes imaged by telescopes on Earth and the nano-satellite in the spacecraft showed a large cloud of dust around Dimorphos extending thousands of kilometers.

After that, the James Webb and Hubble telescopes, which are the most powerful for observing space, revealed detailed snapshots, especially showing the movement of the material that separated from the asteroid.

The spacecraft traveled for ten months from the time it lifted off from California and until it hit the asteroid.

To hit a target as small as Dimorphos, the final stage of the flight was fully automated, as the craft transformed into something like a self-guided missile.

All of this would make it possible to better understand the formation of Dimorphos, which represents a group of fairly common asteroids, and thus measure the exact effect that this technique, called kinetic forcing, could have on them.

Pictures taken of Medemorphos prior to the impact showed that it had a gray, rocky surface and was elliptical in shape.

Knowing these details is important in the event that humanity is forced in the future to collide with a celestial body approaching Earth.

The European "Hera" probe, scheduled to be launched in 2024, will closely monitor Dimorphos in 2026 to assess the consequences of the collision and calculate the asteroid's mass for the first time.

So far, about 30,000 asteroids of all sizes have been observed near Earth (they are called near-Earth objects, meaning that their orbit intersects with the orbit of the human planet). About 3,000 new species are found each year.

Very few of the billions of asteroids and comets in the solar system to which Earth belongs are considered a threat to our planet, and none of them will be so in the next 100 years.

According to scientists, all asteroids with a diameter of a kilometer or more are almost completely detected.

But they estimate that they have only detected about 40 percent of asteroids measuring 140 meters or more, and these have the potential to destroy an entire region.