On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) intentionally slammed into the 160-m-wide asteroid moonlet Dimorphos — which orbits the larger, 780-m-wide asteroid Didymos — for the first planetary defense test. In a new series of papers published in the journal Nature, the DART team detailed the spacecraft’s successful impact, the possible physics behind the collision, observations of the resulting debris ejected from moonlet and calculations of Dimorphos moonlet’s orbital changes. The findings confirm the feasibility of redirecting near-Earth objects like asteroids as a planetary defense measure.
“We can’t stop hurricanes or earthquakes yet, but we ultimately learned that we can prevent an asteroid impact with sufficient time, warning and resources,” said Professor Derek Richardson, a researcher at the University of Maryland.
“With sufficient time, a relatively small change in an asteroid’s orbit would cause it to miss the Earth, preventing large-scale destruction from occurring on our planet.”
“The DART impact happened in a binary asteroid system,” said Dr. Jian-Yang Li, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute.
“We’ve never witnessed an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real time, and it’s really surprising.”
“I think it’s fantastic. Too much stuff is going on here. It’s going to take some time to figure out.”
Using data from spacecraft engineers and from the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO), the DART researchers determined what the spacecraft was looking at as it approached Dimorphos.
“When dealing with observations from a spacecraft, we need to understand where in space the spacecraft is located with respect to the asteroid, the Sun and Earth and where it’s facing at any given time,” said Dr. Tony Farnham, also from the University of Maryland.
“With this information, we have the context to make our…
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