NASA Managed To Change The Trajectory Of A Potentially Dangerous Asteroid
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) space probe has successfully changed the flight path of the asteroid Dimorph, from which a potential danger of a collision with Earth emanated.
At a briefing on Oct. 11, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, which collided with asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, changed the asteroid’s orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos by 32 minutes. Dimorphos, which previously took 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit Didyma, now completes an orbit in 11 hours and 23 minutes.
DART collided with Dimorphos as a test of a “kinetic impactor” technique that could be used to deflect an asteroid into an Earth impact trajectory. According to Laurie Gleizes, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, the mission needed to change orbit by at least 73 seconds, and pre-impact models predicted a change from a few minutes to several tens of minutes. The revised orbit matches these models to within plus or minus two minutes.
Orbit changes were recorded as a result of observations from four telescopes in Chile and South Africa.
