NASA successfully crashed into an asteroid in an attempt to deflect it

No need to sacrifice Bruce Willis.

After a 10-month journey, the DART mission craft successfully impacted the small asteroid Dimorphos at 4:14 p.m. (1:14 a.m. Paris time).

It remains to be determined, in the next few days, if the impact succeeded in deflecting this pebble 160m in diameter.

The latter, which does not threaten the Earth, had been chosen by NASA for a test mission which should enable humanity to learn how to protect itself from potential future danger.

🔴 Spot on!

NASA's DART mission did crash into the asteroid Dimorphos at over 20,000 kph, with live images up to impact.

We will know in the next few days if the deviation is a success #DARTMission pic.twitter.com/OQgCsTOv7E

— Philippe Berry (@ptiberry) September 26, 2022

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First of the size of a pixel, Dimorphos has, in the last moments, filled the entire screen, with images broadcast live (with a small delay of 45 seconds due to the distance) by NASA, thanks to a small on-board camera.

We could see in detail the pebbles on the surface of Dimorphos before the loss of signal.

Images of the impact to come

The size of a small 500 kg car, the ship crashed to the surface, arriving at a speed of 23,000 km/h.

Three minutes after impact, a shoebox-sized satellite, called LICIACube and released by the spacecraft upriver, was expected to pass about 55 km from the asteroid to capture images of the ejecta, the rock fragments and material ejected in a plume of dust.

Many satellites are already at work to determine if this impact has pushed Dimorphos a little closer to the main asteroid of this binary system, Didymos, a pebble 780m in diameter.

Dimorphos has so far done the tour in 11 hours and 55 minutes.

If all went well, the orbit should have been reduced to around 10 minutes.

No danger for the Earth

Didymos and Dimorphos were chosen because they pose no danger to Earth.

And NASA is adamant that even with a massive impact there was no risk of too much disruption to Didymos' orbit, which revolves around the Sun in an elliptical path between Earth and Mars.

Asteroids have held surprises for scientists in the past.

In 2020, the American probe Osiris-Rex had sunk much more than expected into the surface of the asteroid Bennu.

Likewise, the composition of Dimorphos is currently not known.

“If the asteroid responds to the Dart impact in a completely unforeseen way, it could actually lead us to reconsider the extent to which kinetic impact is a generalizable technique,” ​​chief scientist Tom Statler warned last week. of the mission.

66 million years ago, the dinosaurs disappeared after the collision of an asteroid about 10 kilometers large with the Earth.

Nearly 30,000 asteroids of all sizes have been cataloged in the vicinity of the Earth (they are called near-Earth objects, that is to say that their orbit crosses that of our planet).

Today, none of these known asteroids threaten our planet for the next 100 years.

Except that they are not yet all identified.

Those of a kilometer or more have almost all been spotted, according to the scientists.

But they estimate that they only know about 40% of asteroids measuring 140 meters or more – those capable of devastating an entire region.

• Science