BOY ZONE – NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a point between two boulders during the first test of the planetary defense system last September.
The impact of the impact sent debris hurtling into space and altered the rocky oval object’s path farther than previously thought.
Those are some of the findings unveiled by scientists Wednesday in the most detailed report yet from the US space agency’s proving-in-principle mission of using spacecraft to change the trajectory of a celestial body.
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To change the trajectory of the celestial body NASA uses kinetic force to push it off course enough to keep Earth safe.
“The DART test was very successful. We now know that we have a viable technique to prevent an asteroid impact if one day we have to,” said Terik Daly, quoted by ZonaPriangan.com from Reuters.
Terik Daly is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, lead author of one of the DART studies published in the journal Nature.
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The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) collided on September 26 at 14,000 miles per hour or about 22,530 km/h with Dimorphos, an asteroid about 490 feet or about 150 meters in diameter, about 6.8 million miles or about 11 million km from Earth. .
