Asteroid hit by NASA's DART spacecraft is behaving unexpectedly, high school class discovers

[Admin]

Asteroid Dimorphos, which NASA intentionally hit with a rocket during its DART mission in September 2022, is behaving in unpredicted ways.

Asteroid hit by NASA's DART spacecraft is behaving unexpectedly, high school class discovers : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

About those "boulders shaken loose" by the Dart impact. I don't think we really know how many and where they all went. We have been told that the DART impact could not make any new hazards to Earth, because we were just changing the orbit of a minor satellite orbit around a minor asteroid. But, if we have sent "boulders" that were "shaken loose" by the impact into INDEPENDENT solar orbits, I don't think we know that their new orbits are, and whether they intersect Earth's orbit.

Probably not a big deal for the size of these "boulders" from this impact. But I think it is something to seriously consider for any future tests, especially if those tests involve higher inertia transfers or more explosive energy transfers, or targets that more closely approach Earth's orbit.

 

[Classical Motion]

I wonder what they mean when they say tumble?

I think we ought to H nuke one. See if we can vaporize Didymos. Why size mass could survive that? This would be great to watch, and we need real information. Find one of those hard metal rocks to nuke. Let's verify we can protect ourselves.

 

[Lara]

Seems like if so much debris was going off the smaller body, the larger body would attract and be impacted by some of that, gaining mass and shifting the center of gravity even more towards itself, which would pull the smaller body toward it.

 

[24Hz]

Jonathan Swift?! Maybe he's looking for a place to build his own Laputa

 

[Viktor Vasylyev]

This is not surprising given my comments on the articles in Nature:​

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05805-2​

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05878-z​