DART Showed How to Smash an Asteroid. So Where Did the Space Shrapnel Go? | Space

Nearly one year ago, NASA flung the DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour. It was the first test to see whether they could slightly deflect a space rock’s trajectory using a high-speed collision, a technique that could be used to protect Earth from future killer asteroids. It worked. But now they’re trying to figure out the details of the crash. And if people have to defend earthly life from a potential asteroid impact, those details will surely matter.

Scientists are starting by studying the ejecta, boulders, and numerous smaller bits the strike cast off. They predicted there would be debris, but they didn’t know exactly what to expect. After all, compared to stars and galaxies, asteroids are tiny and dim, so it’s hard to ascertain their density and composition from afar. When you strike one, will it simply bounce? Will the probe thud into it and create a crater? Or if the asteroid is brittle, will slamming a craft into it risk creating space shrapnel that is still big enough to threaten Earth?

“This is exactly why we needed to do an in-space test of this technology. People had done laboratory experiments and models. But how would an actual asteroid, of the size we’re concerned about for planetary defense, react to a kinetic impactor?” says 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.

Many asteroids appear to be “rubble piles,” dirt, rocks, and ice loosely held together, rather than something hard and dense like a billiard ball. The asteroid Ryugu, visited by the Japanese space agency’s Hayabusa2 in June 2018, and the asteroid Bennu, which NASA’s OSIRIS-REx took samples from in 2020, both count as rubble piles. A new study published in July in Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that Dimorphos appears to be built like that too, which means that an impact is likely to create a…

Ad Amazon : The reality of UFOs and extraterrestrials is here for those with the courage to examine it. We are not alone! We are only one of many different humanoids in a universe teeming with other intelligent life?