CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – A spacecraft that crashed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away managed to change its orbit, NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its world-saving test.
The space agency attempted the test two weeks ago to see if a killer rock could be moved out of Earth’s path in the future.
“This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a briefing at the space agency’s headquarters in Washington.
The Dart spacecraft cut a crater in the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, throwing debris into space and creating a comet-like trail of dust and debris that stretches several thousand miles. It took consecutive nights of observations with telescopes from Chile and South Africa to determine how much the impact altered the 525-foot, or 160-meter, asteroid’s path around its companion, a very large space rock. bigger.
See: Space Telescopes Capture DART’s Asteroid Impact With Amazing Clarity
Plus: NASA’s DART Asteroid Collider Success Lifts Space Stocks
Before the impact, the moon took 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its parent asteroid. Scientists had planned to shave off 10 minutes, but Nelson said the impact shortened the asteroid’s orbit by 32 minutes.
“Let’s all take a moment to soak it in … for the first time, humanity has changed the orbit” of a celestial body, said Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of planetary science.
Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, co-founder of the non-profit B612 Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, said he was “clearly delighted, without a doubt” by the results and the attention that the mission has led to the deviation of the asteroid.
The team’s scientists said the amount of debris apparently played a role in the outcome. The impact may also have caused Dimorphos to wobble a bit, said NASA program scientist Tom Statler. This may affect the orbit, but it will never return to its original location, he noted.
The two bodies were originally less than a mile, or 1.2 kilometers, apart. Now they are dozens of meters closer.
Asteroid Dimorphos is seen as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft flies toward it on September 26.
ASI/NASA/AP
Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth, and they still don’t as they continue their journey around the sun. That’s why the scientists chose the couple for this all-important general trial.
Planetary defense experts prefer to ward off a threatening asteroid or comet, given years or even decades of lead time, rather than explode it and create multiple pieces that could rain down on Earth.
“We also have to have that warning time for a technique like this to be effective,” said mission leader Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft and managed the mission. of 325 million dollars.
“You have to know they’re coming,” Glaze added.
Launched last year, the vending machine-sized Dart (short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was destroyed when it hit the asteroid 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) away at 14,000 mph ( 22,500 kph).
“This is a huge feat, not only in achieving the first step to being able to protect ourselves from future asteroid impacts,” but also because of the amount of images and data collected internationally, Daniel Brown, an astronomer at Nottingham Trent University in England, he said by email.
Brown also said it’s “particularly exciting” that amateur skywatchers will be able to see the debris tail with medium-sized telescopes.
Scientists on the team cautioned that more work is needed not only to identify more of the countless space rocks out there, but also to determine their composition: some are solid, while others are piles of debris. Reconnaissance missions may be necessary, for example, before launching impactors to divert orbits.
“We shouldn’t be too eager to say that one test on one asteroid tells us exactly how all other asteroids would behave in a similar situation,” Statler said.
However, he and others are happy about this first effort.
“We’ve been imagining it for years and for it to finally be real is really exciting,” he said.