DART detector successfully hit the smaller Dimorph in the binary asteroid. According to predictions, the asteroid will have to slow down by 1% due to the collision. Before the collision, the detector took pictures of its surface.
Asteroid Dimorph impacts DART 11 seconds. This photo is all objects that are over 150 meters in diameter and more than 0.05 astronomical units (astronomical units - the average distance from the Earth to the Sun), or about 19.5 distance from the Earth to the Moon, astronomers believe there is potential danger. As of June this year, about 2,270 such objects are known, but more than 99% of them will not pose a threat to the Earth for at least the next hundred years. However, you need to prepare for potential collisions in advance.
Last year, astronomers at NASA reported that it would take five to ten years to prepare for a dangerous asteroid to deflect. An incoming asteroid may be blown up, but first, charging power will be limited by the device's capabilities, and second, this will create potentially dangerous clouds of debris. It's more logical to refuse to approach the body. To test the kinetic energy impact method, NASA organized the DART task.
DART - "Double Asteroid Redirection Test" - is composed of very simple: a box of about 1.2 x 1.3 x 1.3 meters with several sensors and a camera (DRACO). The total weight is about 570 kg. The detector also carries a small satellite from the Italian Space Agency LICIACube, the "light Italian cube satellite for asteroid investigations".
The goal of this mission is a double asteroid composed of 780-meter asteroid Didyma and 160-meter asteroid Dimorpha. It is one of the potentially dangerous objects, but its flight trajectory will be far away from our planet for a long time. The distance is now 10.9 million kilometers. Compare: The distance to the moon is 364,000 kilometers, and the shortest distance to Mars is 55 million kilometers.
asteroids Didymus (middle) and Dimorph (right) 2.5 minutes before the collision, about 920 kilometers away from
Little Dimorph rotates around the subject in a period of 11.9 hours. The dart hit him at about 22,530 kilometers per hour, ten times faster than a normal bullet. The collision should slow down the orbital period of satellite by 1%, about 10 minutes.
According to Elena Adams
, a task engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, it takes several months to confirm the exact change in the orbital cycle. But the image already exists - thanks to the camera on DART. The last complete image of the surface of
Dimorph was taken two seconds before the impact, with a distance of about 12 kilometers. The picture shows 31 x 31 meters of surface fragments
Italian satellite LICIACube separated from DART fifteen days before the collision. His photos will be posted in the coming days.
DART Team will continue to monitor the asteroid through ground telescopes. Observations and tasks will improve computer models to predict future behavior of asteroids in such collisions. And it is clear that the effectiveness of kinetic energy impact method in deflecting asteroids.
About four years later, the European Hera mission will fly to the double asteroids, studying Didimos and Dimopis in detail, focusing on the craters formed by collisions.
"Now we know that we can guide the spacecraft to hit a small object in space with reasonable accuracy," NASA Administrator Thomas Zubuchen said in a successful comment. "The slight change in its speed is what we need to make a significant change to the trajectory."
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