A Nasa spacecraft called Dart, which rammed an asteroid last month, was able to alter the trajectory of its moving target, officials at the space agency said on Tuesday.
Before the impact, Dimorphos orbited Didymos roughly once every 11 hours and 55 minutes. After the impact, Nasa said the orbit is now 11 hours and 23 minutes — a 32-minute change, based on astronomy observations. Dimorphos now orbits slightly closer to Didymos than it did before., director of Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate, said during the press conference.
Nasa’s minimum requirement for Dart’s success would have been a trajectory change of 73 seconds, which the mission easily exceeded. The precision of the change has an error of plus or minus two minutes. A combination of four optical telescopes and planetary radar was used to determine the asteroid’s new orbit.
Dimorphos never posed a risk to Earth, but was merely a target asteroid to showcase this deflection technique. Asteroids similar in size to Dimorphos could cause regional devastation if they were to hit a populated area on the planet. “I think that the Dart mission has demonstrated that we are capable of deflecting an asteroid, even a potentially hazardous asteroid of this size,” Glaze said.
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