In September 2022, NASA’s double asteroid redirection test successfully demonstrated how a fast-moving spacecraft can change its orbit by hitting an asteroid, which may provide a way to protect the Earth – although this test Asteroids were never really a threat. A follow-up study suggested that debris from the 525-foot-tall (160-meter) Dimorphos might actually strike back, although we weren’t in any danger. The team speculates that the collision created a field of rocky ejecta that could reach Earth within 10 years. The research is currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv and will be published in the Journal of Planetary Science.
The DART mission is so important because it shows that humans actually Do There are ways to protect yourself from existential threats from space rocks like the one that ended dinosaur dominance on Earth some 66 million years ago. The DART team has won the 2023 Gizmodo Science Fair for its excellence in planetary defense.
In the latest study, scientists looked at data collected by the Italian Light Cube Satellite for Asteroid Imaging (LICIACube), which took a close look at DART’s impact on Dimorphos. They then fed LICIACube’s data into a supercomputer at NASA’s Navigation and Aided Information Facility (NAIF) to simulate how asteroid debris, mostly dust and rocks, spread into space. The simulation tracked about 3 million particles produced by the impact, some of which were large enough to produce meteors that can be found on Earth.
Particles from the impact could reach Mars in 7 to 13 years, and the fastest particles could reach our world in as little as 7 years. “These detailed data will help identify meteors produced by DART, allowing researchers to accurately analyze and explain impact-related phenomena,” the team wrote in the paper.
About 40 space boulders were visible near Dimorphos shortly after DART hit the asteroid about two years ago. The mission shifted Dimorphos’ position by tens of meters, suggesting a similar approach could be taken to mitigate the hazards of potentially hazardous asteroids in the future. Although no asteroid has yet threatened life on Earth (as far as we know), it is a real enough threat that space agencies regularly run simulations of worst-case scenarios. But as recent research suggests, simply deflecting an asteroid may be half the battle. Like a stale muffin, you can throw it away…but the crumbs will still be everywhere.
