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Asteroid Didymos and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL.changing its orbital period. Ground and space-based telescopes turned to watch the event unfold, not only to study what happened to the asteroid, but also to help inform planetary defense efforts that might one day be needed to mitigate potential collisions with our planet., well past the impact event.
For the new observations, the scientists used NIRSpec – the near infrared spectrometer — and MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument, on November 28, 2022. The researchers said several lines of evidence suggest that the asteroid and its moon have similar compositions and the team concludes they “can reasonably estimate the composition of Dimorphos specifically from measurements of the Didymos-dominated flux.”
Rivkin added that they’ve made some puzzling observations using polarized light that suggest perhaps the average particle size or the average reflectivity might have slightly changed on Didymos, but they are waiting for spring 2024 to get more observations. “Yes, that comparison seemed particularly apt!” Rivkin said. “What Didymos and Dimorphos are composed of are very common among near-Earth asteroids, so even a randomly chosen meteorite would have a good chance of matching!”
Detailed view of the rubble-pile asteroid 25143 Itokawa visited by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa in 2005. Credit: JAXA
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