On the 26th of September, the agency was deliberately shocked. Space ship With a 500-foot-wide asteroid called Demorphos, orbiting a much larger asteroid called Didymos, a very successful test.
Although it is not the first time that humans have intended to cause a deliberate collision between a spacecraft andspace objectHowever, NASA’s latest experiment is the first in terms of changing the orbit of the asteroid, and preparing a strategy to deflect any asteroids that threaten Earth in the future.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters on Tuesday: "NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us, we’ve shown the world that NASA is a serious advocate for this. planet".
This shift in the asteroid’s orbit suggests that a spacecraft colliding with an asteroid to derail it is a reasonable way to deflect any dangerous asteroids that threaten Earth in the future.
This method is called a strategy motor collisiona potentially scalable method for dispersing much larger space rocks that might cause mass extinctions on Earth, as long as they are detected early enough.
The spacecraft, which is slightly smaller than the size of a car, collided, as expected, at 23:14 GMT with the asteroid at a speed of more than 20 thousand km / h.
Minutes before the spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos Which is 11 million km from Earth, the image of the body is getting bigger and bigger as the spacecraft approaches it more and more.
In a live transmission, the cameras on the spacecraft transmitted stunning images of the astronomical body that showed every detail of Demorphos, including its gray surface and the small pebbles covering it.
The moment the vehicle hit the asteroid and crashed on it, the transmission of images stopped.
Demorphos takes 11 hours and 55 minutes to make a full circle around Didymus. But through the mission that it carried out, NASA sought to reduce this period by 10 minutes by reducing the orbit of Demorphos by bringing it closer to Didymus.
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Feedback results showed via telescope It was revealed in a NASA affidavit that the spacecraft’s suicide test flight (DART) on Sept. 26 achieved its primary goal, which is to change the direction of an asteroid through absolute kinetic force.
On the 26th of September, the agency was deliberately shocked. Space ship With a 500-foot-wide asteroid called Demorphos, orbiting a much larger asteroid called Didymos, a very successful test.
Although it is not the first time that humans have intended to cause a deliberate collision between a spacecraft andspace objectHowever, NASA’s recent experiment is the first in terms of changing the orbit of the asteroid, and preparing a strategy to deflect any asteroids that threaten Earth in the future.
“NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters, Tuesday. planet“.
This shift in the asteroid’s orbit suggests that a spacecraft colliding with an asteroid to derail it is a reasonable way to deflect any dangerous asteroids that threaten Earth in the future.
This method is called a strategy motor collisiona potentially scalable method for dispersing much larger space rocks that might cause mass extinctions on Earth, as long as they are detected early enough.
The spacecraft, which is slightly smaller than the size of a car, collided, as expected, at 23:14 GMT with the asteroid at a speed of more than 20 thousand km / h.
Minutes before the spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos Which is 11 million km from Earth, the image of the body is getting bigger and bigger as the spacecraft approaches it more and more.
In a live transmission, the cameras on the spacecraft transmitted stunning images of the astronomical body, showing every detail of Dimorphos, including its gray surface and the small pebbles covering it.
The moment the vehicle hit the asteroid and crashed on it, the transmission of images stopped.
Demorphos takes 11 hours and 55 minutes to make a full circle around Didymus. But NASA sought, through its mission, to reduce this time by 10 minutes by reducing the orbit of Demorphos by bringing it closer to Didymus.
