The incident happened during a test to alter the trajectory of an asteroid
A rock storm with a force “as deadly as the atomic bomb over Hiroshima” was accidentally caused by NASA during a test mission to alter the trajectory of an asteroid, scientists have found in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the Daily Mail reported.
On September 26 of last year, NASA crashed a spacecraft into asteroid Dimorphos to push it out of orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos. It was the space agency’s first planetary defense mission, known as DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test).
Although early studies indicated that the mission was successful and Dimorphos’ orbit slowed by about 0.02 m/s, it had unintended consequences. Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles found that
37 stones wide about 7 meters
were broken off from the surface of the asteroid when it collided with the spacecraft. The discovery was made when examining images from the Hubble Space Telescope from December 2022.
“Smaller rocks flying into space could cause problems of their own,” the researchers point out. For comparison, even if a stone about 4 meters in size hit the Earth, the energy in the collision would be the same as that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. Scientists compare the Dimorphos stones to a “shrapnel cloud from a hand grenade explosion” that moves through space at a speed of over 20,000 km/h.
While none of the debris from the stricken asteroid is on its way to hitting Earth, scientists worry that in a future asteroid deflection, some of the debris
can overwhelm our planet
at a speed high enough to cause serious damage.
The impacted asteroid Dimorphos does not actually pose any danger to Earth, but was chosen by NASA as a test target because it is about 9.6 million km from us. That makes it both close enough to be of interest to the space agency and far enough away in cases of unintended consequences like those discovered by the California team.
According to the study, the stones were most likely scattered from Dimorphos upon impact with the spacecraft. Evidence of this is a close-up photo taken by DART two seconds before impact. It shows similar stones on the surface of the asteroid to those photographed by Hubble.
“If we track the stones in future Hubble observations, we may have enough data to determine their exact trajectories,” says astronomer David Jewitt, who led the study. In his words, “then we will see in which directions they were ejected from the surface and we will understand exactly how they were ejected.”
2023-08-10 07:03:00
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