The impact of Dimorphos and Didymos on Hera: a massively reddened asteroid in search for a new home. First images from LICIACube

The collision altered the path of Dimorphos through space, shortening the time it takes to orbit another, larger asteroid by 33 minutes, according a new analysis in the journal Nature. The journal published a study detailing the results this week, alongside four additional scientific reports on this unprecedented asteroid deflection experiment.

Scientists will have a close up look at the aftermath of the hit when Hera arrives at Dimorphos. Researchers want to see what the impact crater is like. The movement of Didymos and Dimorphos away from Earth will make them hard to see in telescopes, and will take them behind the Sun.

The DART spacecraft smashed into an asteroid in a first test of planetary defence. Scientists have reconstructed the collision and its aftermath in order to find out how successful humanity was.

Researchers are continuing to work through the DART data to learn more about the physics, chemistry and geology of both Dimorphos and Didymos. A network of amateurastronomy led by Marchis is helping to do this work. The network’s members observed the asteroids with their telescopes before, during and after the impact and discovered that after the spacecraft hit, the rocks seemed to become significantly redder5.

But the most dramatic images were the first ones shared by LICIACube, the mini Italian satellite that followed DART and watched the entire event from a safe distance. The best part? We’re going to see so much more over the next two months.

The CNN Women of Science Award: Dr. Mary-Claire King and the Discovery of the First Stars, Galaxies, and Space Telescopes

It’s difficult to predict who will win these prestigious awards because the nominators, short list and the selection process are kept from public view.

Dr. Mary-Claire King, who discovered cancer-causing genes, is one of many women worthy of candidacy.

Meet more of the female scientists on CNN’s list and learn about the revolutionary discoveries they’ve made in vaccine research, astronomy and chemistry.

Popping fireworks, sizzling bacon and extended booms of thunder are just some of the sounds associated with Earth’s massive glaciers as they fracture and shrink.

The Titanic never got the message from the British steamship that was sent to it on April 14, 1912.

A German submarine torpedoed the Mesaba just six years later, resulting in the death of 20 people. But the exact location of the vessel has been unknown until now.

When compared with Hubble’s view of the same spiral galaxy, the found the bones of it, a feat even more surprising.

Astronomers found that the first image of the universe contained some of the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe, including one that looks a lot like a firework.

– The Hubble Space Telescope may get a boost into a higher orbit to extend its life, depending on the findings under a new exploratory agreement between NASA and SpaceX.

The Physics of Shashing a Spacecraft into an Asteroid: A Simple Example. The Final Velocities and Momentum of DART

There are a couple of things to notice. DART moved backwards after it bounced after the collision. There is a negative momentum in this one-dimensional example due to the fact that velocity is a vector.

We have just two equations and two variables, so they’re not difficult to solve. Here’s what you would get if you did the math. (If you really want all the details, I have you covered.)

Using the values for DART and Dimorphos, this gives a final velocity of 1.46 mm/s. That’s twice the recoil velocity for the inelastic collision. Since the DART spaceship came back, it has a bigger change in momentum. The Dimorphos will have larger changes in momentum and velocity thanks to this. It’s still small, but twice it’s larger than tiny.

There are two extremes of collision: elastic and inelastic. Most fall somewhere in between, in that the objects don’t stick together but kinetic energy is not conserved. The calculations show that an elastic collision is the best way to change the trajectory of an asteroid.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/the-physics-of-smashing-a-spacecraft-into-an-asteroid/

Dimorphos versus Didymos: Probing Asteroids in the Common Orbit with a Different Gravitational Force

Dimorphos orbits Didymos according to the same physics that make the moon orbit the Earth. Since there is a gravitational interaction between them, Didymos pulls Dimorphos toward their common center of mass—a point much closer to the center of Didymos, because it’s larger. This gravitational force would cause the two objects to eventually collide if they both started from rest. That is not the case. Instead, Dimorphos has a velocity that’s mostly perpendicular to this gravitational force, which causes it to move in an orbit around the center of mass. It’s possible (but not absolutely necessary) that this orbit is circular.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Andy Cheng is one of the lead investigators for this mission. He says there was so much rocky material shooting out, the asteroid got an extra kick.

Next year, the European Space Agency will send out a mission called Hera that should take close-up images of the asteroid, revealing the size of any crater left behind. It should also be able to determine the asteroid’s mass. All of this should help astronomers understand even more about how to push asteroids around.

Can we be confident we won’t be wiped out by a giant killer asteroid a week from next Tuesday? Tom Statler is a programme scientist for DART 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.

If we want to divert a threating asteroid, we need to know mass transfer, which is information Andy Cheng, the lead of the DART investigation team said was one of the important things we can measure.

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.

An Infrared-Telescope-Confirmed Colour Change in the Earth’s Interior: Asteroid Impact on a Microquasar

This colour change was confirmed by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, as reported by Cristina Thomas, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, at a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union. We have a lot of material from Dimorphos thrown off and we think this is likely. The impact blasted through the asteroid’s weathered interior and exposed part of its insides, making everything look redder — at least until the fresh material dissipated.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Those images stopped once the spaceship came to a stop. But telescopes on the ground and in space showed that the impact kicked up a huge cloud of dust and debris.

Cheng says that the recoil force was actually bigger than what was delivered by hitting the asteroid.

Although no large space rocks are known to threaten Earth currently, planetary defenders say it’s good to be prepared, just in case, since many small-but-still- dangerous asteroids have not yet been tracked.

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Do we still have eyes on that asteroid-nasa-wacked-distributed-surface-shielding-space-rocks-?

“We know this process is really very effective – it’s even more effective than a lot of people had originally expected,” says Andy Cheng with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

He claims that the experiment has boosted scientists’ confidence that this kind of shielding can work to protect the planet from dangerous space rocks.

“It’s just a bright cloud. A lot of dust came out of the ground. We were amazed. We knew right then, we can do some good science with this,” says Ariel Graykowski with the SETI Institute, who works with a global network of telescope enthusiasts.

The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope was on the wrong side of Earth when the collision happened, so it couldn’t watch the event, but it gazed at the asteroid soon after and watched the debris cloud change over time.

“That’s exciting to see, the tail of a comet formed,” says Jian-Yang Li, with the Planetary Science Institute.

He says the tails looked like those seen on other asteroids. It had never been clear what created those so-called ‘active’ asteroids, although some astronomers suspected impacts played a role.

The tail streaming off of Dimorphos can still be detected by telescopes. “We’ve been observing for a while, we’re going to end observations this month,” said Thomas, with Northern Arizona University.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/04/1161082351/astronomers-still-have-their-eyes-on-that-asteroid-nasa-whacked

Asteroid physics at LHC: how cool is it to be able to move an object with a small number of degrees of freedom?

“We’ve shown that we can move an asteroid,” says Graykowski. It makes me happy to see that it worked, and that it worked well.