Armageddon is canceled: NASA probe successfully changed the flight path of an asteroid

The US space agency says its recent attempt to divert an asteroid's trajectory was successful. with the BBC.

Photo: IStock

Scientists have confirmed that the orbit of the 160m-wide space rock known as Dimorphos was altered when the Dart probe collided with it last month.

The researchers came to this conclusion after taking measurements with a number of space and ground-based telescopes.

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The mission was conceived to test a potential strategy for protecting the Earth from threatening objects.

Dart's achievement proves that such an idea would work if initiated early enough and the target wasn't too massive.

"This mission shows that NASA is trying to be prepared for whatever the universe throws at us," said agency administrator Bill Nelson.

“I believe NASA has proven that we are serious about protecting the planet,” he told reporters.

On October 11, the space agency released a plethora of data to support its assessment, including new images from the Hubble Space Telescope and from a small Italian satellite about 50 km away from the impact.
The double asteroid redirection test (Dart) took place about 11 million kilometers from Earth.

A refrigerator-sized NASA satellite crashed straight into Dimorphos at 22 km/h, destroying itself in the process.

The space rock orbits a much larger (780m wide) object called Didymos. Prior to impact, the time it took Dimorphos to complete one circle around his brother was 11 hours and 55 minutes.

Telescope data now shows that this orbital period has been shortened to 11 hours and 23 minutes, a change of 32 minutes. This corresponds to the convergence of Dimorphos with Didymos - the compression of the orbital path - by "tens of meters".
NASA has determined a minimum successful Dimorphos change period of 73 seconds or more. The results, released Oct. 11, show that Dart has outperformed that figure by more than 25 times.

“This is a 4% change in the orbital period of Dimorphos around Didyma. Dart just pushed him a little,” said Dr. Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who led the NASA mission.

“Timing is really key here so that in the future this kind of asteroid deflection can be used as part of a much larger planetary defense strategy,” she added.

NASA Dart Program Scientist Dr. Tom Statler also cautioned us against drawing too many conclusions from the experiment. He said there are different types of asteroids. Their compositions and designs are very diverse, which was emphasized every time the mission visited a new facility.

“We should not claim that one test on one asteroid tells us exactly how any other asteroid will behave in a similar situation,” he stressed.

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“But what we can do is use this test as a reference point for our physics calculations in our simulations, which show us how different types of impacts should behave in different situations,” he added.

In four years, the European Space Agency (ESA) will have three spacecraft, collectively known as Hera, on Didymos and Dimorphos for additional research.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• On September 26, NASA struck hitting an asteroid about 11 million km from Earth by a spacecraft weighing over 450 kg in an unprecedented planetary defense test.

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