NASA craft that diverted space rock also dented it

Subject: Science and tech

Section: Space

Context:

NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully altered the trajectory and shape of the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, demonstrating a potential method to protect Earth from celestial threats.

Details:

Pre-collision, Dimorphos resembled a plump ball; post-impact, its shape changed to resemble a watermelon or a triaxial ellipsoid.
Dimorphos is a moonlet of the near-earth asteroid Didymos, though neither poses a threat to Earth.
The collision occurred on September 26, 2022, with the spacecraft hitting Dimorphos at about 22,530 kph, about 11 million km from Earth.
Dimorphos is approximately 170 metres wide, while Didymos measures about 780 metres in diameter.
The impact altered Dimorphos’s orbital path around Didymos to become elliptical and reduced its orbital period by 15 seconds, indicating a faster completion of its orbit post-impact.
The asteroid’s orbital period has continued to decay slowly due to the leakage of loose debris from the system, carrying angular momentum and contracting the orbit.

DART Mission:

NASA’s DART mission was a spacecraft designed to test a method of deflecting an asteroid for planetary defense, using the “kinetic impactor” technique (in simplest terms means smashing a thing into another thing).
DART was the first-ever space mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by kinetic impactor.
The target of the spacecraft was a 160-meter-wide asteroid known as Dimorphos, which is a moonlet in orbit around the larger asteroid, Didymos.
It was launched in November 2021.
It is the first time humanity intentionally changed the motion of a celestial object in space.

Source: TH