news agency BBC Reports that the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) confirmed on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022 that the launch vehicle crashed into an asteroid last month. can change the path of Asteroid Dimorphos, which has a width of 160 m, has succeeded.
The collision point between the NASA spacecraft and the asteroid Dimorphos. About 11 million km from Earth, on Sept. 26, the 750 kg craft crashed directly into Dimorphos at a speed of 22,000 km/h, causing the spacecraft to collapse.
The result of this crash As a result, the orbit of Dimorphos, which orbits the asteroid Didimos, which is 780 m wide, has changed by about 4% from the original 11 hours and 23 minutes of orbital time, so it has been completed once, back to 11 hours 32 minutes
NASA came to that conclusion after making telescope measurements in space and on Earth. This is the success of the project. DART or the twin asteroid orbit redirection test mission ‘Dimorphos withDidimos‘ to prove the idea that changing the orbits of asteroids is viable. if the size is not too big
Dr Nancy Chabot, from the Johns Hopkins University Physics Laboratory, who led NASA’s DART mission, said the change was small, but if we were tochange orbitfuture asteroid We will do it many years in advance. The timing of the alarm is therefore important. So that this orbital shift could be applied to larger asteroids in the future.
However, Dr. Tom Stutler, one of the scientists at the DART project, warned that the results could be used as a reference for physics. But don’t be in a hurry to draw conclusions from this test just once. Because each asteroid is different in composition and structure. The next crash may not have the same results as it does now.