Remember that asteroid that NASA intentionally hit with a spacecraft a while ago? Well, it turns out that the people working there are great at math and physics, and that their plan has worked out exactly as they intended. The agency has confirmed that the DART Mission has changed the asteroid's motion in space.
It all happened in September this year, when a human-made spacecraft was sent to hit an asteroid. The craft was traveling at about 14,000 mph (22,530 kph) when it hit the small asteroid called Dimorphos. Insurance information was not exchanged.
In an extraordinarily complex game of Space Pool, the small(er) rock called Dimorphos, which was directly hit by the spacecraft, was then projected into a larger rock, Didymos. The latter was orbited by Dimorphos.
Because the orbit of the latter was set, it was easy for scientists to predict its position when it was going to be hit by a craft, and it was also easy to see if the impact altered its motion.
In an entirely unceremonious announcement that you can read below, NASA has noted that its DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) marks “humanity's first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object, and the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology.”
According to NASA, after the DART intentional collision, Dimorphos' orbit around Didymos was altered by 32 minutes, which led to shortening the 11-hour and 55-minute orbit to one that takes 11 hours and 23-minutes. Mind you, the measurement in question has a margin of uncertainty of approximately plus or minus two minutes, but you get the point.
Before the mission took place, NASA noted that it would be considered a success if the orbit period change was 73 seconds or more. According to data compiled by people smarter than most of us, DART (fun acronym, right?) surpassed this minimum benchmark by more than 25 times. That is a win in our book.
The next step for NASA (see what I did there?) will be to investigate the asteroid's physical properties, as well as to study imagery of Dimorphos from DART's terminal approach.
Thanks to the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACUbe), which NASA received from the Italian Space Agency, the mass and shape of the asteroid will be easier to approximate.
The European Space Agency's project called Hera will dig into the data, including the crater left by the collision, to provide a more precise estimate of Dimorphos' mass.
Editor's note:
For illustration purposes, the photo gallery shows images sent by the NASA spacecraft before it hit the asteroid, as well as images of the spacecraft itself.
Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland. Full profile
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