Washington. “It’s not Hollywood” but NASA: the US space agency announced Tuesday that it managed to divert an asteroid from its trajectory by launching a ship the size of a refrigerator against its surface, in a test mission that will allow humanity to learn to protect itself from a possible threat.
A DART mission spacecraft deliberately crashed into the asteroid on September 26. Dimorphoswhich is the satellite of a larger asteroid called Didymos. In this way, he managed to move it, reducing its orbit in 32 minutes, said the head of the space agency, Bill Nelson, at a press conference.
This is “a defining moment for planetary defense and a defining moment for humanity,” he said.
It would already have been “considered a great success if (the spacecraft) had only reduced the orbit by about 10 minutes. But it actually reduced it by 32,” he added. With this mission, “we show the world that NASA is serious about defending this planet.”
DimorphosLocated about 11 million kilometers from Earth at the time of impact, it is about 160 meters in diameter and does not represent any danger to our planet.
Until now it had circled Didymos in 11 hours and 55 minutes, a period reduced to 11 hours and 23 minutes, Nelson said.
“It looks like a movie script. But it’s not Hollywood (…). This mission shows that NASA tries to be prepared for anything the universe can send us,” he said.
The goal is relatively modest compared to the settings in science fiction movies like Armageddonbut it is an unprecedented “planetary defense” mission, called dart (dart, in English), who tries this technique for the first time.
It allows NASA to train in case an asteroid someday threatens to crash into Earth.
egg shaped
To confirm that the asteroid’s trajectory varied, it was necessary to wait for scientists to analyze the data from telescopes on Earth.
Shortly after the collision, the first images, taken by ground-based telescopes and the nanosatellite aboard the LICIACube mission, showed a large cloud of dust around Dimorphoswhich stretched thousands of kilometers.
Then the James Webb and Hubble telescopes – the most powerful space observatories – revealed details of the impact of the NASA spacecraft, revealing the material torn from the star.
All this should allow a better understanding of the composition of Dimorphosan example of fairly frequent asteroids, and thus measure the exact effect that this technique, called kinetic impact, can have on them.
The images of Dimorphostaken shortly before impact, show its surface to be gray, rocky, and egg-shaped.
Knowing these details is important in the event that humanity is ever forced to deflect an object approaching Earth.
The ship traveled for ten months since it took off from California.
Nearly 30,000 asteroids of all sizes have been cataloged in the vicinity of Earth, but none of them will threaten our planet for the next 100 years, unless all of them are known.
Nearly all of those one kilometer or larger have been located, according to scientists. But they estimate that they only know about 40% of the asteroids that measure 140 meters or more, those capable of devastating an entire region.
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