An image of asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft on Monday, September 26th, 2022. | Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
When a spacecraft slammed into an asteroid last month, it pushed it closer to its companion and sped up its orbit by about 32 minutes. It’s a huge milestone for the field of planetary defense; it establishes that it may be possible for humans to significantly change the path of a potentially hazardous asteroid — especially if we have warning that one is on the way.
When the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission sent a spacecraft crashing into its surface on September 26th, telescopes on Earth and in space were watching the action. Now, initial data from those observatories have shown that DART achieved its goal. Before the impact, the asteroid Dimorphos took about 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its much larger companion…