WASHINGTON : NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a spot between two boulders during last September's first test of a planetary defense system, sending debris hurtling into space and changing the rocky oblong-shaped object's path a bit more than previously calculated.Those were am
WASHINGTON : NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a spot between two boulders during last September's first test of a planetary defense system, sending debris hurtling into space and changing the rocky oblong-shaped object's path a bit more than previously calculated.
"The DART test was phenomenally successful. We now know that we have a viable technique for potentially preventing an asteroid impact if one day we had the need to," said planetary scientist Terik Daly of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, lead author of one of the DART studies published in the journal Nature.
"We were trying to change the amount of time that it took for Dimorphos to orbit around Didymos by colliding head-on with Dimorphos," said Northern Arizona University planetary scientist Cristina Thomas, lead author of another of the studies published in Nature. Prior to the impact, the orbital period was 11 hours and 55 minutes. It now is 11 hours and 22 minutes. NASA's previous estimate, announced in October, was an orbital change of 32 minutes. The benchmark for success had been set as a change of at least 1 minute and 13 seconds."First, one of the spacecraft's solar panels directly hit a large boulder near the impact site. Next, the second solar panel grazed another large boulder.
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