Scientists began to learn ferrous and surprising information about asteroids, after the launch of NASA’s Dart spacecraft test image analysis, when it collided with the asteroid “Demorphos”, and scientists found that when they hit it, asteroids interact strangely like water, and not masses of gravel as they are, according to RT’s website.
And Dr. Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, posted on the social networking site “Twitter”: “I was shocked by the amount of bullets,” as shown by an image taken by a small Italian spacecraft near the asteroid at the time of the collision.
This image shows strands of spider-like material being ejected from Demorphos in the moments after impact, but, Dr. Metzger said, experiments on Earth using sand or gravel and steel balls showed uniformly shaped patches of material. of cone after impact.
Understanding why Demorphos projectiles interact so differently from laboratory experiments may be important to the goals of the Dart mission, which seeks to understand whether the similar effect of a spacecraft can be used to deflect a dangerous asteroid away from Earth.
At the same time, it could reveal that the forces influencing a high-energy collision with an asteroid are similar to those that helped our planet form in the first solar system, and “Demorphos” is not the first asteroid reached by man. nor is it the first asteroid to generate more liquid-like fog in the event of a collision.
In 2019, Japan’s Hayabusa 2 mission used an impact instrument to sample some of the material from asteroid Ryugu, which was then returned to Earth for study in late 2020. Images of the asteroid’s “balls” show it. same ejected material seen in the new Dart impact images, according to Dr. Metzger.
Dr. Metzger pointed out that ejected materials can form when an object falls into water, because water has strong surface tension forces (the force acting perpendicularly along the line of action of the unit of force when this force is parallel to the surface).
He continued: “But the granular materials have no effect like the strong surface tension of water, yes, there is cohesion between the particles, but it is very weak compared to the dynamics of the impact and unable to regulate the projectiles. huge in size. “
Dr. Metzger observed that ejected materials can form when granular materials contain particles of sufficiently different sizes, and this occurs because the granular material, mainly small rocks, bounces off each other and loses energy with each bounce, as does a ball bouncing off an earth’s surface, which means that when enough pebbles bounce back into the microgravity of space, some tend to condense into a region of space because interactions between individual rocks deprive them of the energy needed to travel further.
Dr Metzger explained that this process, known as ‘granular collapse’, has been studied in microgravity experiments and is believed to be part of the process of forming planets and asteroids from the raw material of the protoplanetary disk around the Sun billions of years ago. .
Dr Metzger concluded that these results underscore the importance of conducting real experiments in space, “because we never know what we will see. The universe is surprising and complex.”
