Boulders knocked into space during the DART impact are circled in blue.Image credit: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA)
Boulders knocked into space during the DART impact are circled in blue.Image credit: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA)
Holy arcseconds batman.
Just passing by - read the stupid headline. In all my life, I have never associated or used the word ‘gory’ with rocks splitting up - even ‘gory aftermath’ - just doesn’t go. Almost always for me it involves blood and guts and body parts of some sort.
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...So what unexpected sequence of events have they initiated now?
Review this.
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.
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.
