![]() ![]() ET, when engineers at APL’s mission control stopped receiving signals from the spacecraft, confirming its self-destructive slam into Dimorphos about 11 million kilometers from Earth. Over nearly a year the vending-machine-sized, circa 600-kilogram spacecraft caught up to the asteroids, taking ever sharper images as it approached. “We’re using the momentum from the spacecraft to change the orbit of the asteroid.”ĭART launched in November 2021 on a collision course with Dimorphos, a small asteroid 160 meters in size that orbits another asteroid, Didymos, that is almost five times larger. “We’re not blowing up the Death Star,” says Andy Rivkin, DART investigation team lead at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which runs the mission. In the future, if a dangerous asteroid is found on a collision course with Earth, we might use this same technique to nudge it off course and avert disaster. It’s meant to shift the space rock’s trajectory by a tiny but noticeable amount-a change that observers will carefully confirm and track from afar with a plethora of ground- and space-based telescopes. In the past hour, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a small asteroid called Dimorphos.Īs DART’s full name implies, this impact was no accident. Now scientists have tested a method that might save our planet from future doomsdays. The sight of saurian fossils in most any science museum is a potent reminder that asteroids can threaten Earth as they swing around our sun, occasionally coming dangerously close to our planet-or, 66 million years ago, too close. An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs now Earthlings are fighting back. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |