A spacecraft that ploughed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, Nasa said on Tuesday as it announced the results of its save-the-world test.
The space agency attempted the first test of its kind two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth’s way.
“This mission shows that Nasa is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said during a briefing at their headquarters in Washington.
The Dart spacecraft carved a crater into the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, hurling debris into space and creating a cometlike trail of dust and rubble stretching several thousand miles.
It took days of telescope observations from Chile and South Africa to determine how much the impact altered the path of the 525ft asteroid around its companion, a much bigger space rock.
CONFIRMED: Analysis of data obtained over the past 2 weeks by the #DARTMission team shows impact with Dimorphos has successfully altered the asteroid’s orbit by 32 minutes - marking the 1st time humans have changed the orbit of a celestial object in space! https://t.co/MjmUAFwVSO pic.twitter.com/4Qiy1mC4gK
— NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) October 11, 2022
Before the impact, the moonlet took 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its parent asteroid.
Scientists had hoped to shave off 10 minutes but Nelson said the impact shortened the asteroid’s orbit by about 32 minutes.
Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth – and still do not as they continue their journey around the sun.
That is why scientists picked them for the world’s first attempt to alter the position of a celestial body.
”We’ve been imagining this for years and to have it finally be real is really quite a thrill,” said Nasa scientist Tom Statler.
Launched last year, the vending machine-size Dart, short for double asteroid redirection test, was destroyed when it slammed into the asteroid seven million miles away at 14,000 mph.
Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland built the spacecraft and managed the mission.
“This is a very exciting and promising result for planetary defence,” said the lab’s Nancy Chabot.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here