Scientists are finally releasing all the details of what happened when NASA’s spaceship smashed an asteroid into an asteroid trying to launch a course in September 2022.
MARY LOUIS KELLY, HOST:
Last September, NASA made history by knocking an asteroid off course. A space mission called DART crashed into an asteroid the size of the Great Pyramid in Egypt the size of a wagon ball. The purpose of the asteroid deflection was to find out if it could defend the planet if a large space rock threatened Earth. As NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce reports, astronomers are still watching the asteroid to see how it reacted to the collision.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: It’s called Asteroid Dimorphos. Mission managers at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory got their first real look at the mission’s final moments as the space shuttle came closer and closer, sending back images of the gray, egg-shaped asteroid covered. rubbish
(Soundbite box)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh, my gosh.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Oh, wow.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: After the space went whammo, those images stopped. But telescopes on the ground and in space show that the impact kicked up a huge cloud of dust and debris.
ANDY CHENG: And it was considered a brighter and brighter and brighter thing. So he was producing a lot of shots.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Andy Cheng is one of the lead researchers on this mission. He says it was ejecting so much rocky material that it took an asteroid to kick it out.
CHENG: In the same way that if you fire a gun and shoot a bullet there, it kicks back against you. So this – the expulsion force is the extra force that pushes against the asteroid.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That force, plus the thrust from the ship itself, had a real effect on the path through space. The orbits of other larger asteroids are different, and the collision changes how long it takes to orbit its larger buddy, reducing that time by 33 minutes. That’s according to a new report in Nature. It is one of five scientific papers in this journal that gives a detailed picture of what happened in the case of this experiment. Cheng says the asteroid deflection isn’t just some theoretical sci-fi idea.
CHENG: We know that this process is very effective. It’s even more real than expected.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: In the future, he says, if a dangerous asteroid is headed our way, scientists have more confidence in the ability to deflect it, even larger asteroids or those that show up with less warning. After the impact, astronomers watched in fascination as the cloud of debris around Dimorphos evolved into the comet’s long tail. They can still detect the telescope. Cristina Thomas is an astrologer with Northern Arizona University.
CHRISTINA THOMAS: Let’s keep it still, and wrap up our observations in March.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Next year, the European Space Agency will send a mission that will take close-up images of the asteroid, showing what the crater is like there, and the mass of the asteroid, all of which will help astronomers understand it as well. plus how to push asteroids around. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or modified in the future. Availability and availability may vary. The official record of NPR programming is the audio record.
#NASA #history #knocking #asteroid #information #published
