Press Agency BBC It reported that the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) confirmed on Tuesday, October 11, 2022 that the launch vehicle crashed into an asteroid last month. can change the path of The asteroid Dimorphos, which has a width of 160 m, has been successful.
The collision point between the NASA spacecraft and the asteroid Dimorphos. About 11 million km from Earth, on September 26, the 750 kg aircraft crashed directly into Dimorphos at a speed of 22,000 km / h, causing the spacecraft to collapse.
The result of this accident.As a result, the orbit of Dimorphos, which orbits the asteroid Didimos, which is 780 m wide, changed by about 4% from the original 11 hours and 23 minutes of orbital time, so it was completed once, returning to 11 hours 32 minutes
NASA came to this conclusion after making measurements with the telescope in space and on Earth. This is the success of the project. DART or the twin asteroid orbit redirection test mission ‘Dimorphos withDidymus‘to demonstrate the idea that changing the orbits of asteroids is feasible. If the size is not too big
Dr Nancy Chabot, of the Johns Hopkins University physics lab who led NASA’s DART mission, said the change was minimal, but if we were tochange orbitfuture asteroid We will do this many years in advance. The timing of the alarm is therefore important. So that this orbital shift can be applied to larger asteroids in the future.
However, Dr Tom Stutler, one of the scientists on the DART project, warned that the findings could be used as a reference for physics. But don’t rush to draw conclusions from this test just once. Because each asteroid is different in composition and structure. The next crash may not have the same results as now.
