On Monday, a NASA spacecraft deliberately collided with an asteroid while trying to change its course, in an unprecedented test aimed at teaching humanity how to prevent cosmic bodies from destroying life on Earth.
The spacecraft, slightly smaller than a car, collided, as expected, at 23:14 Moscow time with an asteroid at a speed of more than 20 thousand kilometers per hour.
And the US space agency broadcast the facts of this collision directly to the air. As soon as the spacecraft collided with the asteroid, NASA crew members gathered at the mission control center in Maryland, USA, exploded with joy.
A few minutes before the spacecraft collided with the asteroid Demorphos, which is located 11 million km from Earth, the image of the object began to gradually increase and increase as the spacecraft approached it.
Live, the spacecraft’s cameras broadcast stunning images of the astronomical body, showing every detail of Dimorphos, including its gray surface and the small pebbles covering it. At that moment, when the device collided with the asteroid and crashed into it, the transmission of images stopped.
“We have entered a new era in which we are likely to have the ability to protect ourselves from dangerous asteroid impacts,” said Lori Gleese, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.
Demorphos with a diameter of about 160 meters does not pose a threat to the Earth. In fact, this small asteroid is a moon orbiting another larger asteroid called Didymos.
Demorphos takes 11 hours and 55 minutes to make a full circle around Didyma. But NASA is aiming, through a mission it carried out on Monday, to shorten that period by 10 minutes by reducing Demorphos’ orbit closer to Didymos.
It will take days to weeks to see if the small asteroid’s trajectory has indeed changed as a result of the impact. And this task will be performed by scientists on Earth through their telescopes, through which they will observe the contrast of brightness when a small asteroid passes in front of and behind a large asteroid.
Although its goal is modest compared to the scenarios of a number of sci-fi films such as Armagedden, this unprecedented test mission opens up an era of learning about how humanity will defend itself if an asteroid one day threatens life on Earth.
“I think the earthlings can now sleep peacefully,” said Elena Addams, the mission’s engineer. “For my part, I’ll do it.”
Watch attentively
The spacecraft traveled ten months from the time it took off from California to the time it hit the asteroid.
In order to hit a target as small as Demorphos, the last leg of the flight was fully automated, turning the ship into something of a homing missile. According to the mission plan, a small shoebox-sized satellite called Lycia Cube, launched by the spacecraft some time ago, will pass within 55 kilometers of the small asteroid three minutes after impact to photograph projectiles generated by the impact. .
It is also assumed that the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes observed a bright cloud of dust left by the impact, and thus this will help estimate the amount of ejected material. All this will allow us to better understand the composition of Demorphos, which is a group of fairly common asteroids, and thus measure the exact impact that this method, called kinetic impact, can have on them.
The European probe Hera, scheduled to launch in 2024, will closely monitor Demorphos in 2026 to assess the effects of the collision and calculate the asteroid’s mass for the first time.
unknown things
In the past, asteroids have been fraught with surprises for scientists. In 2020, the American probe OSIRIS-REx came closer to the surface of the asteroid Bennu than expected. Similarly, the composition of Dimorphos is currently unknown.
“If an asteroid reacts to a dart impact in a completely unexpected way, this could lead us to rethink the extent to which kinetic impact can be a universal technology,” warned mission chief scientist Tom Statler last week.
66 million years ago, dinosaurs disappeared after a large asteroid about 10 kilometers in diameter collided with the Earth.
To date, about 30,000 asteroids of all sizes have been observed near the Earth (they are called near-Earth objects, meaning that their orbit intersects with the orbit of the planet Earth). And every year it finds about three thousand new species. Very few of the billions of asteroids and comets in Earth’s solar system are considered a threat to the planet, and none of them will be in the next 100 years. According to scientists, all asteroids with a diameter of a kilometer or more were discovered almost completely. But they estimate that they have only found about 40% of asteroids 140 meters or larger, and they could devastate an entire region.
“This is a very interesting period (…) for the history of space and even the history of mankind,” said Lindley Johnson, member of NASA’s Planetary Defense Division.
