Posted on 09/27/2022 1:13:52 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: Could humanity deflect an asteroid headed for Earth? Yes. Deadly impacts from large asteroids have happened before in Earth's past, sometimes causing mass extinctions of life. To help protect our Earth from some potential future impacts, NASA tested a new planetary defense mechanism yesterday by crashing the robotic Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into Dimorphos, a small asteroid spanning about 170-meters across. As shown in the featured video, the impact was a success. Ideally, if impacted early enough, even the kick from a small spacecraft can deflect a large asteroid enough to miss the Earth. In the video, DART is seen in a time-lapse video first passing larger Didymos, on the left, and then approaching the smaller Dimorphos. Although the video ends abruptly with DART's crash, observations monitoring the changed orbit of Dimorphos -- from spacecraft and telescopes around the world -- have just begun.
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
Today's image is a video at the source link.
The planetoid looks like dirt and rock mixed together. Just how hard is the asteroid? Did anyone get a picture of the impact?
I saw this live. It was cool.
When will they know if they deflected it?
Did it burst into lots of smaller asteroids some which are now headed to Earth?
Don’t look up...........................😉
interesting surface, wonder how much of that was picked up in space
That must be the asteroid they used for the beginning of Mystery Science Theater 2000.
Looks like a heath bar covered peanut.
Thanks for posting that video clip!
It’s probably now on a collision course for earth.
That is probably how asteroids form. Little rocks and dust drift together from their gravitational pull, drawing more rocks and dust from their combined pull, eventually accumulating enough mass to form a lumpy pile of rocks and dust, and after a few million years they are stuck together as an asteroid. If they accumulate enough mass (the result of millions of years of collisions) their gravitational pull is sufficient to make them round planetoids, moons and planets.
There were two probes, one to impact and a second to take pictures
https://www.space.com/dart-asteroid-crash-first-photos-liciacube
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICIACube
I think a recent asteroid probe had to do a touch and go due to the thing just being loose dirt.
haven’t had one of them in thirty yar
Yea, that’s cool.
and like a snowball rolling downhill, prolly has accumulated more mass than it started with...
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