Last year, NASA successfully knocked asteroid Dimorphos off course through its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. However, the probe reportedly produced a deadly boulder swarm.
Where's the Shrapnel From DART Mission
Astronomer David Jewitt from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to repeatedly zoom in on Dimorphos to understand what happened following the crash. By combining their profound observations, they could distinguish items that would have been too faint to observe otherwise.
A swarm of roughly 30 boulders, the largest of which is 7 meters in diameter, was discovered gently drifting away from the asteroid a few months after the DART probe's crash. Approximately 5,000 tons of boulders are being carried away by a slow-moving cloud of shrapnel resulting from the hit.
Jewitt said it was "quite a lot," considering that the impactor only weighed half a ton. He concluded that it blew out a tremendous mass of boulders.
Despite being successful, the test had unanticipated consequences, according to the scientists. Smaller meteorites that launch into space may pose problems.
Jewitt noted that the massive space rocks have the same speed as the targeted asteroid. Thus, they are equally deadly. Even a 15-foot asteroid reaching Earth would create as much energy comparable to the atomic bomb unleashed in the city of Japan during World War II.
The DART team and other experts are also looking into the rock cloud released by the spacecraft's quick hit. Earlier this year, Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead and a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which developed the craft in partnership with NASA, and her coworkers published research in Nature that included Hubble images of the ejecta.
They demonstrated how the fragments initially dispersed in a cone-shaped cloud, but with time, the cone transformed into a tail remarkably similar to a comet's tail. According to Chabot, this discovery also suggests that impactors like DART could benefit from using comet behavior models.
What's NASA's Next Plan After the DART Probe?
Scientists are attempting to take a closer look at the damage caused by DART. By spring 2024, as Dimorphos and Didymos continue their orbits around the sun, they will be sufficiently close for Hubble and other ground-based observatories to see them.
The HERA follow-up mission, launched by the European Space Agency, will examine the impact's aftereffects. HERA will take off in October 2024 and arrive at Dimorphos in the latter half of 2026.
Then, in the middle of 2028, NASA intends to launch NEO Surveyor, a spacecraft that will search for at least two-thirds of potentially dangerous asteroids the size of Dimorphos that are 140 meters or larger. As most infrared light is blocked by the atmosphere of Earth, it will require infrared sensors, which must be placed in space.
Chabot hopes to see further missions focused on planetary defense. Having many tools on hand is reportedly crucial.
The team is proud of what the DART achieved in bringing much attention to planetary defense. However, Chabot believes there are still many things to do to ensure the planet's safety.
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