Taipei news schedule of October 12,NASA(NASA) announced Tuesday that the agency’s test mission to use a spacecraft to push a distant asteroid out of orbit was a success. The test demonstrated a potential new way to protect Earth from dangerous space meteorites that astronomers may discover in the future.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft changed the orbit of a moving target, NASA said Tuesday. “NASA has shown that we are serious defenders of the planet,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told reporters at a news conference.
On September 26 this year, the refrigerator-sized DART crashed into an asteroid called Dimorphos at a speed of 14,000 miles per hour (approximately 22,500 kilometers per hour). The size of a football field, Dimophos orbits a much larger asteroid, Didymos. The momentum of the impact, combined with the recoil of the particles ejected from the collision, significantly changed the path of the “Demophers” in space.
Prior to the impact, NASA reported that “Dedymos” orbited “Diddymos” approximately every 11 hours and 55 minutes. After the impact, according to astronomical observations, the orbital time is now 11 hours and 23 minutes, which is 32 minutes less than before. Now, “Dedymos” orbits slightly closer to “Diddymos”.
“For the first time ever, humans have altered the orbits of planetary objects,” Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of science mission directorate, said in a news release.
The minimum requirement for a successful DART test is a trajectory change time of 73 seconds, measured by NASA, and this mission far exceeded that requirement. The accuracy of the change is plus or minus two minutes. NASA used four optical telescopes along with planetary radar to determine the asteroid’s new orbit.
Demophorus never posed a threat to Earth, it was just a target asteroid that NASA used to demonstrate this push-off technique. If an asteroid similar in size to Demophorus hits a populated area of Earth, it could cause regional damage.
“I think the DART mission has shown that we have the ability to deorbit an asteroid, even a potentially dangerous asteroid of this size,” Glaz said.
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