Posted on 07/23/2023 7:04:06 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the gory aftermath of the first-ever intentional collision between a spacecraft and an asteroid, revealing a debris field of at least 37 "boulders" flung thousands of miles into space.
On Sept. 26, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft disintegrated as it smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, which is 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, successfully changing the asteroid's trajectory.
Now, by using Hubble to study the impact, astronomers have found that DART's roughly 14,540 mph (23,400 km/h) impact on the asteroid produced a "swarm of boulders." The rocks, which range from 3 to 22 feet (0.9 to 6.7 meters) in diameter, were most likely shaken loose from the asteroid's surface during the impact. The researchers published their findings July 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes," David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. "The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system."
DART's goal was to change the orbit of Dimorphos around its larger partner — the 2,560-foot-wide (780 m) asteroid Didymos — by at least 73 seconds. However, the spacecraft widely exceeded that target, altering Dimorphos' orbit by a whopping 32 minutes...
The boulders, which make up an estimated 0.1% of Dimorphos' mass, were spotted drifting away from the asteroid at just over a half mile per hour (0.8 km/h) — "roughly the walking speed of a giant tortoise," according to NASA.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
None. This showed that direct impact can be used to knock apart the rare impact threats.
For now. They'll accelerate as they're pulled by gravitational fields until they collide with something. Knowing karma, it will be with other satellites.
Sometimes it's best to leave the marbles where they're at.
I can’t imagine that someone hasn’t calculated the effect of a source of thrust on an asteroid’s surface to divert its trajectory.
So, wake me when they’ve launched an experimental mission to place multiple thrusters on a celestial body to yield hard data on newtons vs. mass vs. orbital plane in proof of concept.
Until such a time that humans harness the power of antimatter or some other effective scale of destruction (nuclear is hardly considered ‘effective’ in such circumstances), or some other form of spaceflight (non-chemical) which would also yield a trajectory change by imparting forces upon such a celestial body:
*yawn*
I’m glad they indicated which way was north and east. I was lost there for a second.
Ass-Turd-Oid-Ologism is going to be hot ticket in the Mid-21st Century.
Get your certifications and degrees started now!
Awesome result...
However, means when the time comes to avoid Apophis we would have to hit it many years in advance of its impact (2036 or 2068) on Earth...
With humankind’s inbred procrastination, we are doomed to extinction...
So, I understand the drawback of breaking up an object because now you have lots of objects to deal with. But wouldn’t lots of smaller objects be more likely to burn up in the atmosphere rather than one large object? Think of tossing a one ounce cube of oak into a fireplace vs one ounce of oak sawdust.
The thing to keep in mind is, even a nuke would only provide enough energy to blow a crater out of one side and bump the entire rock (and there's only one or perhaps a handful of bigger ones *known* that are at all a possible threat, for now) and that's the method they used here. And this particular rock isn't anywhere near being a threat, before or after this DART mission. :^)
Gory?> So there was blood shed by the asteroid?
The purpose of the Dart experiment was to see if such an impact could change the trajectory of an incoming object to Earth. What it showed was the shattering of such an object into many pieces. This is not what we want hitting the earth.
Remember when they blew up the Death Star? The Ewoks are all burnt up and dead. Every one of them.
They were annoying in truth.
The Western world is in the hands of lunatics. The greatest danger from Apophis could be as soon as 2029, if some lunatic space-capable country or cabal gives it a nudge prior to its VERY close approach on April 13.
It's just the right size to take out Moscow or any major Chinese city.
No, what it showed was, the method works. It’s right in the excerpt.
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