![]() ![]() One of them, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, saw a small pinprick of light that dramatically brighten ed, then shed an immense amount of debris-the pulverized rock that was thrown off of Dimorphos. The evening of the impact, ground-based telescopes caught images of DART completing its mission. Megan Bruck Syal of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory calls those images “incredible” and says that they’re helping researchers learn about how planetary impacts unfold in reality-which will inform the simulations she and her team work on. Less than three minutes after the collision, the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube sailed by the wreckage and snapped images of the ballooning debris cloud. “Normally, losing signal from the spacecraft is a very bad thing, but in this case, it was the ideal outcome,” Ralph Semmel, director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), told reporters after the crash.Īs astronomers suspected, Dimorphos is what’s known as a rubble-pile asteroid-a loose conglomerate of rocky blocks, rather than a single, solid mass. In a few minutes, Dimorphos grew from a hazy clump of pixels to an egg-shaped, boulder-strewn mini-world that filled the spacecraft’s field of view-growing larger and larger until the transmission abruptly cut off as the final image was coming in. As it hurtled toward the moonlet at more than 14,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft furiously snapped images of its target. Roughly seven million miles from Earth, DART slammed into Dimorphos just after 7:14 p.m. “We showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet.” Swatting an asteroid “NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters on October 11. And while it’s not the first time humans have crashed a spacecraft into a cosmic object-we’ve done that to the moon, a comet, and an asteroid to study the impacts-it is the first time we did so with the intent to alter the object’s orbit, and to prepare a strategy for deflecting any future killer asteroids. To accomplish its mission, the spacecraft’s impact only needed to tighten Dimorphos’s orbit by just over a minute, a benchmark it far exceeded. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |