China News Service, Beijing, February 27 (Reporter Sun Zifa) The latest planetary science paper published by Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature Astronomy" believes that in the "Double Small Planet" of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) The asteroid moon Dimorphos may have been reshaped after the DART impact.
The results suggest that Dionysus may be a loose debris pile composed of material shed by its asteroid twin, Didymos.
According to reports, the DART planetary defense demonstrator completed its mission on September 26, 2022, impacting Twin, a satellite of a near-Earth asteroid twin, and shortening its orbital period by 33 minutes.
DART plays an important role in planetary defense and also provides information about the internal structure of asteroids and the impact of an impact on their properties.
In this study, SD Raducan, the first author and corresponding author of the paper, University of Bern, Switzerland, together with colleagues and collaborators, used the most advanced impact physics code to use the first batch of DART results to provide information about the mechanical and compositional properties of the twin moons. realistic constraints to model the DART impact.
The closest simulations to impact observations suggest that Titan is loose, with adhesion strengths similar to the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu, and lacks large chunks of rock on its surface.
They believe that the twin moons may be debris piles formed by the swirling scattering and reaccumulation of ejected material from the twin stars.
The model constructed in this study also shows that the DART impact may not have created an impact crater, but may have reshaped the moon as a whole, a process called global deformation, which caused the internal material of the moon to restructure its surface.
The authors of the paper concluded that the findings of their current study provide more insights into the formation and characteristics of binary asteroids, or may affect future exploration, such as the European Space Agency's (ESA) upcoming "Hera" asteroid defense mission and Asteroid deflection work.
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