United States (U.S.) President Donald Trump has offered asylum to the Iran women’s football team after the Iranian state media labelled them as “traitors” following the team’s refusal to sing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s national anthem.

The Iran women’s football team, currently in Australia for the Asia Cup, lost their final group match on Sunday and are set to return home to Iran amid the ongoing U.S.-Israel and Iran war.

Australia is facing calls to protect the team and prevent them from returning to Iran.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the U.S. president wrote: “Australia is making a terrible humanitarian mistake by allowing the Iran National Women’s Soccer team to be forced back to Iran, where they will most likely be killed.”

Trump urged the Australian prime minister to offer them asylum, adding, “The U.S. will take them if you won’t.”

This comes after the football team refused to sing Iran’s national anthem before their first match on March 2.

They have since performed the anthem in the subsequent matches but the Iranian media have described the initial act of defiance as “the pinnacle of dishonour.”

A campaign is ongoing in Australia calling for the government to “Save our girls”. An online petition calling for Australia to ensure the safety of the women’s football team has garnered more than 50,000 signatures so far.

The Australian government is yet to react to the U.S. president and human rights activists’ demands.  

In a groundbreaking development, researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have discovered that humans successfully deflected an asteroid from its regular orbit around the Sun in a 2022 experiment, marking a historic first in planetary defence.

In 2022, NASA scientists deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid moonlet, Dimorphos, and successfully changed its path around its parent asteroid, Didymos.

For context, a moonlet is a very small natural satellite, typically under 1-2 km in diameter, that orbits a planet, dwarf planet, or asteroid.

Now, researchers have found that the first-ever successful demonstration of human capability to change an asteroid’s trajectory also resulted in the deflection of both asteroids from their regular orbits around the Sun.

A recent study published in the journal Science Advances revealed that the spacecraft’s collision with the moonlet caused Didymos’s speed to slow by 11.7 micrometers per second.

The researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign determined the change after examining more than 6,000 orbital laps of the asteroid around the star.

This means that future missions could target the moonlets around asteroids to change their orbit, if they pose a threat to Earth.

The lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA Headquarters in Washington, Thomas Statler, hailed the incredible success achieved through the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

He said, “This is a tiny change to the orbit, but given enough time, even a tiny change can grow to a significant deflection.”

Despite the success, NASA has warned that there are no other DART-like spacecraft ready for launch if the need arises.