Posted on 07/11/2025 6:38:41 AM PDT by BenLurkin
NASA’s DART asteroid redirection mission may have inadvertently made future asteroid deflections much more challenging after its test sent boulders hurtling through space on unexpected trajectories.
In September 2022, the DART mission successfully altered the orbit of asteroid moon Dimorphos. Unfortunately, the smaller space rocks that were dislodged when the kinetic impactor struck the natural satellite achieved three times the momentum of the spacecraft that created them.
The University of Maryland-led team (UMD) behind the new research paper on DART’s repercussions cautions that results demonstrate planetary defense may be considerably more complex than previously suspected, with the potential for many unintended consequences.
...
The researchers’ data came from an Italian cubesat named LICIACube, which was sent to follow up on the DART mission, as Earth-based observations would be inadequate for deriving precise measurements from the aftermath. In the LICIACube images, the team identified 104 boulders moving at speeds of up to 116 miles per hour and tracked their trajectories in three dimensions. These newly independent space rocks range in diameter from 0.2 to 3.6 meters.
Based on the craft’s impact, the team believes that its solar panels broke up larger boulders on Dimorphos’ surface before the main body hit. That first part of the impact most likely created the largest debris cluster, which holds roughly 70% of the known objects. This cluster raced away from the asteroid at high velocity.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedebrief.org ...
The very first sentence is illogical.
That's all?? 116 mph hardly moves the needle in outer space terms.
Bashing the asteroid with a spacecraft is not done at the atomic or sub-atomic level.
funny thing is... THEY will by accident or chance... actually cause the wormwood doomsday... with their ignorant meddling.
Wanna avoid judgement and destruction, use spiritual hi tech which has been around for ages...
use force “R”: AKA Repentance.
Newton has already said something about that, the law of conservation of momentum. It says that the TOTAL momentum after such a collision is equal to the total momentum before the collision. The boulder had momentum before the collision and that must also be considered along with its momentum as it was changed by the collision.
116mph??? That’s essentially stationary when talking about bodies in space or even just in orbit around the earth.
Or the writer used the word “momentum” when a different word was appropriate.
You’re getting into Einstein’s relativity zone here, and even he says that it sometimes gets ‘spooky’. Light, that is photons have energy, E. Using Einstein’s famous E=mc^2 equation, the energy of the photon has an equivalent mass, m=E/c2^. That mass times its velocity equals its momentum. Given this thread’s topic, the velocity must treated as a 3-dimension vector.
Light has mass, just no rest mass. The quantum, or relativistic if you prefer, momentum of a photon is completely consistent with the classical radiation pressure of light predicted by Maxwell’s equations. Photons only exist if they moving at the speed of light.
That’s not what’s going on here, obviously. The debris had to get its momentum from somewhere, assuming the measurements are accurate. Momentum is a vector quantity, and the total momentum of the system before and after the collision is unchanged. The momentum of pieces flying off to the left and right cancels. They would have to get energy from someplace. In a collision energy is generally LOST to friction, it becomes heat. The kinetic energy of collision debris is never more than the kinetic energy of constituents, UNLESS there is source of energy other than the kinetic energy of pieces, such as the explosive charge in an artillery round.
The interceptor brought its own kinetic energy to the party, so the total kinetic energy of the debris, including the inceptor’s, would very likely be greater than the kinetic energy of the asteroid prior to collision.
MY GUESS: Another poorly written “science” article. Call it a hunch.
Intentionally creating their own scary “asteroids”?
That would be the LLM's that tell you to put glue on pizza.
Sure.
No way that could go wrong.
I will stick with humans. In singular we can be pretty dumb but in aggregate we are pretty smart. Computers that have been programmed using stolen fiction on the other hand tend to produce nonsense on a regular basis.
“Photons only exist if they are moving at the speed of light.”
I dig what you’re saying but my pea-brain can’t wrap itself around that.
Newtonian math starts breaking down both on the microscopic and astronomical levels. Really small and really big object things get weird.
Of course in this instance it probably isn’t a problem with Newtonian physics. They say the objects are faster than the rocket that “made” them, but the rocket wasn’t the only object with momentum that spawned them, they were part of a larger rock that got hit BY the rocket. So the math is much more baseball than golf.
Energy and mass are the same thing. That’s what E = mc2 really says, it just shows the constant of proportionality between two ways of expressing the same physical reality. Maxwell, Heaviside, Hertz, Fitzgerald, Lorenz, and Poincaré were on the verge discovering relativity, they just could not abandon the illusion of absolute time.
If the material was less dense than thought, yet absorbed a large portion of the momentum of the spacecraft, its velocity would be higher than the spacecraft. Chunks of rock fleeing a hammer strike are a great deal faster than was the hammer.
“Sunshine was also deputy principal investigator on a somewhat similar mission, Deep Impact,” I wonder whether she grew up just knowing she would be an astronomer; can you imagine everywhere you go people saying “here comes little Miss Sunshine?”
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