“This is a very exciting and promising result for planetary defense,” APL’s Nancy Chabot, DART coordination lead, said during the October 11 briefing. Both techniques produced the same answer. The other two, in California and West Virginia, made radar measurements of the asteroids. Four of them, in South Africa and Chile, watched the double asteroid system for the brief blips in brightness produced as Dimorphos orbits Didymos. Over the past two weeks, astronomers pinned down the change in Dimorphos’s orbit using six ground-based telescopes. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope also caught the collision, with Hubble images recording a three-fold increase in brightness because of all the reflective dust. One of them, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, saw a small pinprick of light that dramatically brighten ed, then shed an immense amount of debris-the pulverized rock that was thrown off of Dimorphos. The evening of the impact, ground-based telescopes caught images of DART completing its mission. Megan Bruck Syal of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory calls those images “incredible” and says that they’re helping researchers learn about how planetary impacts unfold in reality-which will inform the simulations she and her team work on. Less than three minutes after the collision, the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube sailed by the wreckage and snapped images of the ballooning debris cloud. “Normally, losing signal from the spacecraft is a very bad thing, but in this case, it was the ideal outcome,” Ralph Semmel, director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), told reporters after the crash.Īs astronomers suspected, Dimorphos is what’s known as a rubble-pile asteroid-a loose conglomerate of rocky blocks, rather than a single, solid mass. In a few minutes, Dimorphos grew from a hazy clump of pixels to an egg-shaped, boulder-strewn mini-world that filled the spacecraft’s field of view-growing larger and larger until the transmission abruptly cut off as the final image was coming in. As it hurtled toward the moonlet at more than 14,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft furiously snapped images of its target. Roughly seven million miles from Earth, DART slammed into Dimorphos just after 7:14 p.m. “We showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet.” Swatting an asteroid “NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters on October 11. And while it’s not the first time humans have crashed a spacecraft into a cosmic object-we’ve done that to the moon, a comet, and an asteroid to study the impacts-it is the first time we did so with the intent to alter the object’s orbit, and to prepare a strategy for deflecting any future killer asteroids. To accomplish its mission, the spacecraft’s impact only needed to tighten Dimorphos’s orbit by just over a minute, a benchmark it far exceeded. The sim's final stages were just before and just after the asteroid's impact.Please be respectful of copyright. Participants were given information about where the asteroid was headed, its size, and how likely an impact would be. The simulation began with the discovery of an asteroid on a trajectory toward Earth, SciAm reports, and each subsequent meeting in the days-long exercise would hop ahead in the timeline of the crash course. "The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact." Space Rock "We designed it to fall right into the gap in our capabilities," Emma Rainey, a senior scientist at Hopkins' APL who was part of the creation of the simulation, told the magazine. And the stark conclusion of the mixed virtual and in-person gathering, conducted along with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) campuses in Maryland and North Carolina? Humanity is woefully unprepared for the threat of a catastrophic asteroid impact. NASA has apparently gotten into tabletop gaming, but the stakes are decidedly higher than an evening of "Dungeons & Dragons."Īs Scientific American reports, NASA's most recent tabletop simulation - or Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise, if you want to make it official - was its fourth. "The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact." Big Bad
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