![]() ![]() Its egg-like shape and craggy, boulder-dotted surface finally came into clear view in the last few moments as DART raced towards it at roughly 23,500km/h (14,500 mph). Never actually photographed before, Dimorphos appeared as a speck of light about an hour before impact. But if it is “fluffy” and significant mass is pushed at high velocity in the opposite direction to impact, there will be an additional boost. If an asteroid is more solid, the momentum imparted by a spaceship will be limited. ‘Rubbish pile’Īhead of the test, NASA scientists said the results of the experiment would reveal whether the asteroid is a solid rock, or more like a “rubbish pile” of boulders bound by mutual gravity. The binary asteroid system, which was about 11m km (6.8m miles) from Earth at impact, is visible only as a single dot from the ground. Thanks to its temporary new tail, Dimorphos, which is 160 metres (530-foot) in diameter or roughly the size of a big Egyptian pyramid, has turned into a man-made comet.īut quantifying just how well the test worked required an analysis of light patterns from ground telescopes, which took a few weeks to become apparent. “I grew up watching Armageddon and Deep Impact and all that, and it is amazing to see this stuff become a reality,” Cendes said. The pictures were collected by Earth and space telescopes as well as a satellite that had travelled to the zone with DART. “There is no risk in this case because this was a deliberately chosen target to make sure that this would not happen,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at Harvard University, told Al Jazeera.ĭART’s success as a proof-of-concept has made a reality of science fiction.Īstronomers rejoiced in stunning images of matter spreading out thousands of kilometres in the wake of the impact. The asteroid pair loop together around the sun every 2.1 years and pose no threat to Earth, but they posed an ideal test of the “kinetic impact” method of planetary defence in case an actual approaching object is ever detected. “We showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet,” Nelson said. Speeding up Dimorphos’ orbital period by 32 minutes exceeded NASA’s own expectation of 10 minutes. “DART shortened the 11 hour, 55 minute orbit to 11 hours and 23 minutes,” he said. The fridge-sized Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor deliberately smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, pushing it into a smaller, faster orbit around its big brother Didymos, NASA chief Bill Nelson said. NASA says it has succeeded in deflecting an asteroid in a historic test of humanity’s ability to stop an incoming cosmic object from devastating life on Earth. ![]()
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