NASA: The rocky moonlet was successfully pushed out of its natural orbit by the spacecraft that NASA purposefully smashed into an asteroid last month, marking the first-time humans has changed the motion of a celestial body. This was revealed by NASA’s administrator on Tuesday.
A watershed moment for planetary security and a watershed moment for civilization.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters that the findings marked “a watershed moment for planetary security and a watershed moment for civilization.”
An asteroid’s course was changed by pure kinetic force during the DART spacecraft’s suicide test flight on September 26 according to results of telescope views released at a NASA news briefing. This was the primary goal of the test trip.
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Seven years of research and development went into the $330 million proof-of-concept DART mission, which also served as the first ever test of a planetary defence system meant to shield Earth from a cataclysmic meteorite collision.
Dimorphos, an egg-shaped asteroid about the size of a football stadium that orbited Didymos, its parent asteroid, once every 11 hours, 55 minutes, was the heavenly target of the DART mission.
The goal was to immediately strike Dimorphos with the DART impactor vehicle, which was no larger than a vending machine, at a speed of around 14,000 miles per hour (22,531 kilometres per hour). This would generate enough force to move the moonlet’s orbit closer to that of its larger sibling.
A comparison of the Dimorphos orbit around Didymos’ pre- and post-impact astronomical measurements revealed a 32-minute reduction in its trajectory, demonstrating the exercise’s viability as a method of diverting an asteroid from a collision course with Earth, should such an asteroid ever be discovered.
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Dimorphos’ orbital route would be reduced by at least 10 minutes, according to APL scientists, but even a shift of just 73 seconds would have been deemed successful.
According to NASA experts, neither of the two asteroids used in the test, nor DART (short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test), posed any threat to Earth.
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