NASA craft that diverted space rock also dented it
- March 21, 2024
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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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