GOOGLE has buried a gift for users of its search engine – and space fans are going to love it.
Type the word “meteorite” into the Google search bar and you’ll be launched into outer-space (sort of).
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An animated meteorite will streak across the search results, before crashing into the corner of the screen, causing it to shake.
Why has Google created this Easter egg?
Google launches special graphics, games, animations, and illustrations to celebrate important events, people, and holidays.
But the shtick doesn’t end with the meteorite.
Typing “Nasa Dart mission” or “Nasa Dart” into the search engine will trigger an animated spacecraft to race across your screen.
The animated meteorite and spacecraft launched in September last year, to celebrate the completion of Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission, which set off in November 2021.
What was the Dart mission?
Dart sent a “vending machine-sized spacecraft” to collide with asteroid Dimorphos, which is the size of a football, Nasa said in a tweet.
The Dart spacecraft hitting the asteroid was humanity’s first planetary defense test.
However, the future of humanity was not resting on the success of the mission – the asteroid posed “no threat” no threat to Earth, Nasa wrote in the tweet.
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Members of the mission operations staff watched the impact as the asteroid grew in size on the spacecraft’s camera feed.
“We have impact!” a commentator announced in the footage.
Dimorphos was not destroyed in the mission, but this was never the intention.
“This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption,” Nancy Chabot, planetary scientist and Dart coordination lead at the Applied Physics Laboratory, told the AP.
Nasa hopes creating a large crater in the asteroid’s surface from the impact will alter its orbit.
In the future, Nasa may employ similar missions to deflect incoming asteroids that threaten our planet.
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