Left to right and top to bottom: Dart’s impact as seen at different times by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Italian Liciacube satellite, the Soar Telescope in Chile, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Nasa/ESA/STScI/J.-Y. Li (PSI)/J. DePasquale (STSci); ASI/Nasa ; CTIO/NOIRLab/SOAR/NSF/AURA/T. Carriage (Lowell Observatory), M. Knight (US Naval Academy); NASA/ESA/CSA/C. Thomas (Northern Arizona Univ.), I. Wong (NASA-GSFC) and J. DePasquale (STSci)
Five months after the impact, the results of this life-size experiment conducted by NASA were published in the journal Nature. The success is total, because the energy transmitted exceeds that provided by the probe.
The test is conclusive. In case of danger, humanity should be able to deflect an asteroid that threatens to crash into our planet. Provided it wasn’t too big and we got there early enough, a reasonably sized kinetic impactor would be more than capable of deflecting it significantly off course. These are, in essence, the results of the life-size experiment conducted by NASA last September and unveiled this Wednesday in a series of five articles published in the journal Nature .
The general public had already been able to follow the maneuver broadcast live by NASA on September 22. As the Dart (“dart” in English) probe got closer to its target, we then discovered, at the same time as the engineers and the scientists, the small double system formed by two asteroids, Didymos (800 m in diameter approximately ) and Dimorphos (about 150 m). Fascinatingly enough, this is the…
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