Nasa managed to deflect an asteroid from its path in an Earth defense test

Europe 1 with AFP 9:37 p.m., October 11, 2022

NASA, the American space agency, announced on Tuesday that it had succeeded in deflecting an asteroid from its trajectory by projecting a vessel the size of a refrigerator against its surface at the end of September during an unprecedented test mission, which should allow the humanity to learn how to protect itself from a possible future threat.

The Dart spacecraft had deliberately crashed into its target, the asteroid Dimorphos, and managed to move it by reducing its orbit by 32 minutes, space agency chief Bill Nelson told a press conference. .

This is "a watershed moment for planetary defense, and a watershed moment for humanity," he said.

"It's Not Hollywood" 

It would already have been "considered a huge success if it (the craft) had only reduced the orbit by about 10 minutes. But it actually reduced it by 32 minutes," he added.

With this mission, "Nasa has proven that we are serious as defenders of the planet," he said.

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"It looks like a movie script. But it's not Hollywood (...). This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for anything the universe could throw at us," he said. he declares.

To confirm that the trajectory of the asteroid had indeed been altered, it was necessary to wait for scientists to analyze data from telescopes on the ground.

The latter observed the variation in brightness when the small asteroid passes in front of and behind the large one.

The result of the images captured by the telescopes 

Soon after the collision, early images - taken by ground-based telescopes and the onboard nano-satellite for the LICIACube mission - showed a vast cloud of dust around Dimorphos, stretching for thousands of kilometres.

Then the James Webb and Hubble telescopes, the most powerful space observatories, revealed detailed views of the impact of the NASA spacecraft, showing in particular the movement of ejecta, the material torn from the star.

All this should make it possible to better understand the composition of Dimorphos, representative of a population of fairly common asteroids, and therefore to measure the exact effect that this technique - called kinetic impact - can have on them.

Images of Dimorphos, taken shortly before impact, show its surface to be gray and rocky and egg-shaped.

30,000 asteroids cataloged around Earth

Knowing these details is important in case humanity ever finds itself forced to crash into an object approaching Earth.

The ship had traveled for ten months since its takeoff in California.

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.