NASA spacecraft will crash into an asteroid at 15,000 mph. Will it make a dent?

[Admin]

NASA's DART mission will crash a spaceship into an asteroid at 15,000 mph. The mission launched in November.

NASA spacecraft will crash into an asteroid at 15,000 mph. Will it make a dent? : Read more

 

[Helio]

By my calculations (so open to scrutiny), the 560 kg DART probe hitting the moon (Dimorphos) at ~ 24,000 kph would move it only about 25 km during 1/2 of its orbital period about the Sun. But this would be true only if 100% of the momentum is transferred and it also ignores the movement limits imposed by its primary (Didymos), which is ~100x more massive.

But the orbital dynamics likely would move it much farther than 25km after about a year. Perhaps we will see some calculations on that in the near future.

[more details here.]

 

[newtons_laws]

Quote from article "This high-speed crash will barely phase the asteroid, causing it to lose a fraction of a percent of its velocity, according to NASA. "
Err, that should be faze, not phase.