If successful, it would be the first demonstration of deflecting an asteroid using so-called kinetic impactor technology. The primary goals of the DART mission were simple, at least in concept: Hit Dimorphos with the roughly 570-kilogram (half-ton) DART spacecraft to alter the orbital period of Dimorphos around Didymos significantly and measure that change and characterize the physics of the impact. “We needed to understand the Didymos-Dimorphos system before we changed it,” said Cristina Thomas, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2022. “We needed to understand the Didymos-Dimorphos system before we changed it.” That’s serendipitous, because by monitoring how the brightness of the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system varies over time, scientists were able to precisely determine how long it took Dimorphos to complete an orbit: 11 hours and 55 minutes. Dimorphos is about one fifth the size of Didymos, and its orbit takes it in front of and behind Didymos as seen from Earth. It wasn’t until 2003 that scientists realized that a much smaller body, dubbed Dimorphos, was also present. But astronomers back then spotted only its larger member, Didymos, which is roughly 800 meters (half a mile) in diameter. Peering at an OrbitĭART’s target, the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system, was first discovered in the mid-1990s. At AGU’s Fall Meeting 2022 held in December, researchers presented a slate of new results from NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the first demonstration of asteroid deflection. But unlike other forms of life- here’s looking at you, dinosaurs-humans have a fighting chance of altering our cosmic destiny. Rocks from space have walloped Earth for eons, and it’s only a matter of time until our planet lands yet again in the crosshairs of a very large asteroid.
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