CNN Indonesia
Monday, 06 Mar 2023 14:33 WIB
The asteroids Dimorphos and Didymos were successfully repelled by NASA’s DART aircraft. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Handout via REUTERS)
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reveals the key to the success of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission (DART) that destroys to dispel asteroids is with optimal preparation time.
According to NASA, the optimal time for preparation for a planetary defense mission is several years or possibly decades. NASA itself is launching the DART mission in late November 2021, after five years of planning.
These planetary defense missions relying on a “kinetic impactor” technique essentially changing the asteroid’s trajectory by crashing a rocket into the asteroid at high speed. DART is the first planetary defense mission to use this method.
The DART aircraft itself managed to crash into its destination asteroid in September 2022 after traveling for 10 months. As a result, DART managed to collide with the asteroid Dimorphos, a ‘natural satellite’ 160 meters wide and orbiting a larger asteroid called Didymos at a distance of 11 million kilometers from Earth.
The force of the impact changed Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 33 minutes, and managed to divert the celestial object’s trajectory.
“I cheered when DART hit an asteroid for the world’s first demonstration of planetary defense technology, and that’s just the beginning,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA.
“These findings add to our fundamental understanding of asteroids and lay the foundation for how humans can defend Earth from potentially dangerous asteroids by changing their course.”
For the record, these two asteroids have never actually posed a risk to Earth. The size of the asteroid and its ideal orbit are considered by NASA to carry out the DART mission on this asteroid.
The results of the DART mission have been published in four papers in the journal Nature.
The first study reviews the successful DART impact with an asteroid in detail, re-describing the timeline leading up to the impact, the location and nature of the impact itself, and the size and shape of Dimorphos.
Meanwhile, the second study used two different methods to confirm the 33-minute deceleration of Dimorphos’ orbit, and the third study calculated the momentum transferred from the DART probe to the asteroid, as quoted from Live Science.
Then, the latest study explains how the collision of DART and Dimorphos produced dusty debris that appears to stretch into space for thousands of kilometers.
(lom/lth)
