The administrator of the US space agency, Bill Nelson, pointed out that before the impact Dimorphos took 11 hours and 55 minutes to revolve around another larger asteroid called Didymos, with which it forms what is known as a double asteroid system.
The spacecraft managed to reduce that orbit by 32 minutes. “It would have been a success if it had only shortened it by regarding 10 minutes, but it actually reduced it by 32 minutes and changed its trajectory,” he said, congratulating himself on the result of that planetary defense mission carried out in September.
Dimorphos’s orbit has now moved regarding 10 meters closer to Didymos and the resulting change in its trajectory is permanent.
It was the first time in human history that an attempt was made to change the trajectory of a celestial body with the aim of protecting the Earth from asteroids similar to the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
The impact of DART, an acronym for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, took place on September 26 and was broadcast live. That unmanned craft was regarding the same size as a refrigerator or a food vending machine and cost more than $330 million to build.
“Two weeks ago, NASA made history once more. We carried out humanity’s first planetary defense test and showed the world that NASA is a serious defender of this planet,” Nelson said in presenting the conclusions of that mission.
Dimorphos (“two forms” in Greek) is a 160-kilometer-diameter moon-like body in space that revolves around the 780-meter-diameter Didymos, whose name means “twin” in Greek. They were selected by NASA because they pose no threat to Earth.
Nasa pointed out that the conclusions of this Tuesday are only “the beginning” of all the information that they hope this mission will provide them, designed to test existing technology in the event that there were to be any celestial body that posed a direct danger. .
The mission sought to deflect the asteroid in question, not destroy it. “It is not to explode the asteroid into millions of pieces, but (to give it) a little push,” Nancy Chabot, one of the main researchers working on the DART spacecraft, advanced in mid-September.
Breaking up the asteroid is not a good defense strategy because, as was added today, instead of having one big object going towards the planet there would be many smaller ones.
The agency made it clear on Tuesday that one of the key elements in successfully carrying out similar missions is early detection. “The more time we have for that little push, the better off we are,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said today.
International cooperation is also essential. “Planetary defense is not only a problem for the United States or Italy, which cooperated in this mission. We should all be involved and working,” he said.
The calculations made this Tuesday have a margin of error of approximately two minutes. Astronomers will now continue to study the Dimorphos images obtained to get a rough estimate of its mass and shape.
In regarding four years, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera project also plans to conduct detailed studies of both Dimorphos and Didymos, with a particular focus on the crater left by the DART collision. and precise measurements of the mass of Dimorphos.
