Big success: NASA asteroid impact leads to major boost

Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP) — NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its Save the World test that a spacecraft that crashed into a small harmless asteroid millions of miles away successfully changed track.

Two weeks ago, the space agency attempted to conduct a test to see if a killer rock could be pushed away from Earth in the future.

“This mission shows that NASA is working hard to prepare for whatever the universe throws at us,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a briefing at space agency headquarters in Washington.

Dart spacecraft carves a crater on asteroid Dimorphos 26 on Sept. 2, tossing debris into space in comet-like trails of dust and rubble Stretches thousands of miles (kilometers). Nights of telescopic observations were conducted in Chile and South Africa to determine how much the impact altered the 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid’s path around its companion, a larger space rock.

Before impact, the small moon orbited its parent asteroid for 11 hours and 55 minutes. Scientists had expected a reduction of 10 minutes, but Nielsen said the impact shortened the asteroid’s orbit by 32 minutes.

Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of planetary science, said: “Let’s take a moment to understand … for the first time ever, humans have changed the orbits of celestial bodies.”

Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, co-founder of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, said he was “obviously pleased with the results of the mission and the focus on asteroid deflection, and that no doubt”.

Scientists on the team said the amount of debris clearly had an impact on the results. That effect may also have wobbled Dimorphos a bit, said NASA project scientist Tom Statler. He noted that this may affect the track, but it will never return to its original position.

The two bodies were originally less than a mile (1.2 kilometers) apart. Now they are dozens of yards (meters) closer to them.

Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth — and still won’t as they continue to travel around the sun. That’s why the scientists chose this pair for this very important rehearsal.

Given the years or even decades of preparation time, planetary defense experts would prefer to push a threatening asteroid or comet away rather than blow it up and create multiple fragments that could rain down On Earth.

“We really need that warning time for this technology to be effective,” said Nancy Chabot, mission leader at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft and managed the value. $325 million mission.

“You have to know they’re coming,” Glaze added.

Vending machine-sized darts introduced last year – Short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test – Destroyed when it hit an asteroid 7 million miles (11 million km) away at 14,000 mph (22,500 km/h).

“This is a huge feat, not only a first step in potentially protecting ourselves from future asteroid impacts,” said astronomer Daniel Brown of Nottingham Trent University in the UK, but also for the large number of internationally collected In terms of images and data, said via email.

Brown also said it was “particularly exciting” that the debris tail could be seen by amateur astronomy observers using medium-sized telescopes.

Team scientists warn that more work needs to be done not only to identify more of the myriad space rocks, but also to determine their composition — some solid, while others piles of rubble. For example, a reconnaissance mission may be required before an impactor is launched to deflect the orbit.

“We shouldn’t be in a rush to say that one test of one asteroid can tell us exactly how other asteroids will behave in similar situations,” Statler said.

Still, he and the others were happy for the first effort.

“We’ve been imagining this for years, and it’s really exciting to finally make it a reality,” he said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Division was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Division of Science Education. The Associated Press is solely responsible for all content.

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