Today, Tuesday, October 11, NASA offered a press conference where it reported the result of the Dart planetary defense mission and gave the answer to the big question we expected, was the asteroid managed to be diverted, the answer is Yes.
The objective of the Dart mission was to hit an asteroid to deflect it and in this way test for the first time in history the techniques to deflect other asteroids or comets that could be a threat to the earth and thus have an effective planetary defense.
The mission consisted of a NASA impactor ship weighing about 570 kilos and a small ship or cubesat called liciacube from the Italian space agency, that small ship would be in charge of taking images of the moments after the impact, at 7 hours and 14 minutes pm EDT North American Eastern Time on September 26 and almost 11 million kilometers from earth, the Dark spacecraft impacted at 22,530 kilometers per hour against the Dimorphos asteroid that is between 160 170 meters in diameter and orbits as a Moon to another larger asteroid called Didimos of about 780 meters in diameter.
Neither of these two asteroids posed a risk to the earth, they were simply perfect for testing, the objective of the mission was to move the dimorphic asteroid, which acts as the moon, in such a way that the orbit was shortened by approximately 1% or 10 minutes, although those responsible for the mission were content to shorten the orbit by 73 seconds, in this way the movement of the asteroid would be altered but it would continue to orbit Didinos. And both asteroids would continue to revolve around the sun without posing a risk to our planet.
NASA has reported that this objective has been achieved and by far, before the impact Dimorphos took 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit Didimos, after the collision Dimorphos shortened its orbit by 32 minutes, now it takes 11 hours to make a turn Didimos and 23 minutes, this measurement has a margin of error of approximately ± 2 minutes, even so the effect is much greater than expected, according to experts it may be due to the explosion of tons of rocks and dust that were thrown with the impact and which made a push effect similar to when a balloon is punctured.
Knowing if the asteroid had been diverted was the main data expected from the mission, but there are many more topics to study, enigmas to solve and effects to explain, for example, how much material was expelled by the impact, because the amount seems huge, currently these remains of dust and rocks have formed a tail of more than 10,000 kilometers, Dimorphos more than an asteroid looks like a comet right now.
In about 4 years the Hera mission of the European space agency will travel to these two asteroids and will provide us with a more detailed view of how they have evolved, an image of the crater left in dimorphs and also a large number of details that will be extremely useful to us. To come up with effective planetary defense plans, we humans have taken the first step to prevent what happened to the dinosaurs.
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