Jakarta –
Airplane NASA towards which he was hit asteroid last month he managed to push the target. The asteroid now orbits faster and marks the first time that humans have been able to change the motion of a space object.
Airplane Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, but NASA does not know whether the asteroid was successfully moved or not. The plane crashed into Dimorphos which is 10.9 million km from Earth at a speed of 22,000 km / hour.
For the past two weeks, astronomers have relied on telescopes on Earth to study Dimorphos’ orbit around the asteroid Didymos. They found that Dimorphos’ orbit shrank by 32 minutes, from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes.
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The DART team estimates that this collision will reduce Dimorphos’ orbital duration by at least 10 minutes, but a change of just 73 seconds is already considered a successful mission. So a change of up to 32 minutes means a huge success for NASA.
“When I look at Dimorphos, and when I see that there isn’t a single crater on it, and there is a lot of rock … I look at it and say, ‘It won’t take 73 seconds.’ And apparently not, ”NASA program scientist Tom Statler said, as quoted by Mashable, Wednesday (12/10/2022).
The DART team will continue to monitor the Dimorphos asteroid and collect data from observatories on Earth. These observations will also be assisted by the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube satellite, which flew with the mission. DART.
The European Space Agency (ESA) will also send a HERA mission to the asteroid Dimorphos over the next four years. This further observation should answer some of the questions that remain unsolved.
“To what extent does the kinetic impact change the asteroid’s motion? How efficiently is momentum transferred? It’s too early to tell, there are still a lot of moving parts in this calculation,” Statler said.
NASA launched the DART mission to the asteroid Dimorphos as part of a test of Earth’s defense against the threat of a dangerous asteroid. Even so, Dimorphos and Didymos are not actually asteroids that threaten life on Earth.
Dimorphos is one of 27,500 near-Earth asteroids monitored by NASA. Although most of these asteroids do not have the potential to hit Earth, NASA estimates that there are many other undetected asteroids near Earth.
See also the video ‘Sighting of the Asteroid Hit by NASA’s Aircraft’:
(vmp / fay)
