NASA knocks asteroid off course in Earth defense test
The Dart ship crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos.
© AFP PHOTO NASA Johns Hopkins APL
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It's a total success.
NASA has successfully deflected an asteroid from its trajectory after deliberately hitting it.
A training of "
planetary defense
" in case one of them should one day threaten the earth.
This exercise produced better results than expected.
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The mission was already a success.
On September 27, the Dart probe struck the asteroid Dimorphos 11 million kilometers from Earth, the first stage of an attempt at planetary defense.
The objective was to modify its trajectory.
“
The extent of the effect of the impact is almost beyond our expectations, greater than most likely expected.
On the other hand, we still lack information to really understand what it tells us
, summarizes Patrick Michel, CNRS research director at the Côte d'Azur observatory and member of the Dart team.
In reality, to know it, it would be necessary to be able to see it and to know if indeed, one left a crater, if one deformed it, to measure its mass - it is this mass which tells us what is the quantity of deviation that we produced, if we wanted to reapply this deviation to an object around the sun.
In fact, we deflected Dimorphos from his trajectory around another body.
So we still lack information.
»
It is for this reason that a second mission will visit Dimorphos: the European probe Hera.
Lift-off is scheduled for 2024 to precisely study this asteroid and fully determine how the impact has transformed it.
These are essential data to expand and generalize the lessons of this first planetary defense mission to other asteroids.
►Also read: For the first time, NASA hits an asteroid in order to deflect it
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