Yes, they fixed from .01 % chance of hitting earth to 20% chance of hitting earth.
Just kidding.
Cool.
Note to Sodom: (This wouldn’t have saved you either)
DART Ping!....................
DART Mission Impact Changed Asteroid’s Motion in Space...And Now It’s Headed This Way
So, that re-positioned it to hit Washington, DC?
*Fingers Crossed* ;)
Now it’s time to build a MUCH larger one or more and keep them in storage.
I suppose...
Meanwhile NASA has called Bruce Willis and asked him to clear his calendar.
Good luck trying to stop a gamma ray burst wiping us all out. The oldest GRB detected is thought to have released in just 1 second around 300 times the energy that our sun will release in it’s life of 10 billion years. The star Apep ( serpent diety) in the constellation Norma, is a possible GRB candidate.
Granted that the orbital time decreased due to the impact, but would orbital time also decrease because of the now lighter mass of the asteroid (ejecta loss)?
This could be a great plot for a disaster film. The path of the asteroid they alter could intersect and alter another, bigger asteroid’s path, sending it on a collision course with Earth.
They could call it “The Butterfly’s Wings”
When man with celestial orbs doth interfere
The boulders fall from wife’s brassiere.
And wincing the nonce, in timely rhyme
A fools paradise lost, whence horned sublime.
( Willie Shagsphere)
Whatever they say about their reasons, this was effectively a test of a weapon system which could wipe out continents in a single strike.
Find a big thing which grazes Earth (such as Apophis) and smash a small thing into in a very carefully calibrated manner. Now you have a weapon to take out thousands of square miles at a location of your choosing. And there’s many objects out there larger than Apophis, some of them large enough to melt continents.
This experiment provides data for the calibrating of future deflections.
So they bumped it and now it’s a little bit different orbit.
But would not the same gravitational forces that created the previous orbit still exist and slowly bring it back to where it was?
Seems that the loss of mass from the impact might change it’s orbit a bit though.
Next test, embed the nose of a rocket near the axis of rotation of a larger asteroid, then ignite the rocket to change the trajectory of the asteroid.
Blueprint for the Apophis mission. TBD before April 2029.
I told everyone it was heading for Earth!!