NASA changes an asteroid’s orbital path around the Sun, a first for mankind
A spacecraft smashing into a binary asteroid system has managed to change its path around the Sun, a new analysis has revealed
Asteroids Binary, Didymos and Dimorphos.
In September 2022, a NASA spacecraft collided with an asteroid. Called Dimorphos, the rock is the smaller asteroid in a binary pair; It orbits a large planet called Didymos. The collision with Dimorphos told scientists several things: The collision jolted the asteroid slightly off its course, slowing its orbit around its larger companion by about 30 minutes, and suggested that a similar method could help protect Earth from encroaching asteroids.
But now the mission has revealed something even darker: By slowing Dimorphos’ orbit, NASA has managed to change the orbit of the entire binary system around the Sun. Changing the orbit of a natural object around our home star is a first for humanity.
in a study published in the journal on friday progress of science, The researchers explain how the original collision with Dimorphos slowed the entire binary’s solar orbit by about 12 microns per second. Researchers say the new data could help NASA better prepare to deflect asteroids that could one day threaten the planet.
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“If (an asteroid) is ever on a collision course with Earth, we can now say with more confidence that we have the ability to push them around and away from Earth,” says Rahil Makadia, lead author of the study.
Dimorphos and Didymos do not pose a threat to Earth. But they were chosen as targets for the Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) to assess our planetary defense capabilities, Makadia explains. fast pace Involved The 570-kilogram spacecraft, traveling at about 22,530 kilometers per hour, hit Dimorphos to slow its journey around Didymos. Nevertheless, scientists believed the test might be able to change the pair’s heliocentric orbit as well.
“This was something we thought about even before the DART impact,” says Makadia. “But we didn’t know to what extent it would happen and whether we would be able to measure it.”
Makadia and his team combined radar measurements and observations of the binary system as it passed in front of the Sun to compare the asteroids’ pre-DART orbit with their postimpact path. The analysis found that the system’s nearly two-year journey around the Sun slowed by about 11.7 microns per second, or about 370 meters per year.
The discovery is “pretty cool,” says Jay McMahon, associate professor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. McMahon has worked with the DART team in the past but was not involved in the new study. “Like any experiment, you can predict what will happen, but then you have to take measurements to prove it,” he says. “And so, this proves it.”
Makadia and his colleagues also calculated the collision’s “momentum increase factor”, which essentially measures how much the loss of rocks, dust and other material during the impact contributed to the change in orbit. “It basically doubled the push from the spacecraft alone,” says Makadia. The team estimated the mass of each asteroid separately for the first time.
Masatoshi Hirabayashi, another DART scientist who was not directly involved with the new study and is an associate professor in aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the findings could have broad implications beyond planetary defense. He says knowing the relative masses and density of asteroids can help scientists better understand their composition, “it is an important piece of information about how binary asteroids formed.”
More data coming soon: The European Space Agency’s Hera mission is set to take a closer look at DART’s impact on Dimorphos and Didymos later this year, including the crater left from the collision.
“Once we get the measurements from[Hera]we can come to these numbers in a completely independent way and confirm them and maybe even build on them,” Makadia says.
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