Studies reveal final moments before NASA probe crashed into an asteroid.
. It seems to be a loose pile of rubble barely held together by gravity — whose surface would probably shatter spectacularly when DART hit it.The discovery of more details is helping researchers to understand why the impact was so successful in shunting the asteroid, says Carolyn Ernst, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
One factor is that the spacecraft hit a spot around 25 metres from the asteroid’s centre, maximizing the force of its impact. Another is that large amounts of the asteroid’s rubble flew outwards from the impact. The recoil from this force pushed the asteroid further off its previous trajectory.
“If you had asked me 30 years ago, ‘Can we be confident we won’t be wiped out by a giant killer asteroid a week from next Tuesday?’ I would have had to say no,” adds Tom Statler, DART’s programme scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. Now that astronomers have surveyed the skies to identify nearly all the dangerous asteroids — and now that DART has been shown to work —“we will know what to do about it when something new is found”, he says.
Researchers are continuing to work through the DART data to learn more about the physics, chemistry and geology of both Dimorphos and Didymos. This work is being done with the help of a network of amateur astronomers co-led by Marchis. The network’s members observed the asteroids with their telescopes before, during and after the impact.
Scientists will get a close-up view of the impact’s aftermath in late 2026, when a European Space Agency craft named Hera will arrive at Dimorphos. Researchers are keen to see what sort of impact crater the DART smash left behind. In the meantime, detailed scientific observations will continue for several weeks, until the movement of Didymos and Dimorphos away from Earth makes them too faint for many telescopes to see, and then takes them behind the Sun.doi: https://doi.org/10.
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