11/9/2023 0 Comments Nasa meteorI've been emotional all day and that was one of the key moments for me." "But I knew it would be all sooty," Lauretta jokes. "It was like seeing an old friend that you hadn't seen for a long time." There was no sign of any damage," says Lauretta. The capsule, blackened from its fiery reentry through the atmosphere, looked almost like a UFO-shaped charcoal briquette, the size of a mini-fridge. Mission managers tracked the fall of the capsule with radar and deployed helicopters in order to retrieve it once it safely touched down in the desolate desert. "It's the end of a journey and the beginning of a new one," says Lauretta, adding that the laboratory investigation ahead is his focus now. ![]() He says he felt pride, awe, gratitude, overwhelming relief, and had to convince himself it wasn't a dream. "That was the moment I knew we made it home." "And then we heard 'main chute detected,' and I literally broke into tears," he recalls. Lauretta says he was in a helicopter, listening to updates from mission controllers, and mentally preparing himself for the worst if the parachute failed. So far, though, DART has clearly taught us that it might be difficult to move mountains, but we can certainly move asteroids.Science A NASA Spacecraft Successfully Touched Down On A Rocky Asteroid Ultimately, the more we can learn about DART’s impact (pun intended) on the pair, the better prepared we can be to launch another, larger mission to redirect an actual threat to Earth in the future, should one arise. And a future European Space Agency mission, Hera, will visit the pair after launching in late 2024. They also hope additional observations will help pin down Dimorphos’ surface properties and mass, which isn’t accurately known. Researchers will also continue to watch the asteroids’ motion and rotation through March 2023, when celestial geometry will render the pair unobservable from Earth for a time. At last week’s Division for Planetary Sciences conference in London, Ontario, several researchers commented on the surprising and intriguing nature of this lingering debris, whose long-term presence was somewhat unexpected. Images from several observatories, including the CFHT and SOAR telescopes, show Dimorphos sporting a stunning cometlike tail. In particular, scientists are eager to study the huge cloud of dust and debris thrown out by the impact, which stretches at least 6,000 miles (10,000 km) long and has persisted for weeks. But despite the fact that the DART spacecraft has been smashed to smithereens, researchers’ work is far from complete. The mission can now be crowned a success. “As new data come in each day, astronomers will be able to better assess whether, and how, a mission like DART could be used in the future to help protect Earth from a collision with an asteroid if we ever discover one headed our way,” said NASA planetary science division director Lori Glaze in a press release. It’s a watershed moment in the field of planetary defense, which aims to understand and ideally mitigate the risks posed to Earth from asteroids and comets that may cross our planet’s path. That’s roughly 26 times the mission’s 73-second baseline for success. After following the pair for two weeks, NASA announced yesterday that Dimorphos’ 11-hour and 55-minute orbit has since shrunk to 11 hours and 23 minutes, a difference of 32 minutes. DART’s goal was to adjust the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos, aiming to alter its nearly 12-hour period by at least 73 seconds. ![]() The target, Dimorphos, is the 525-foot-wide (160 meters) moonlet orbiting a larger asteroid, 65803 Didymos, which is 0.5 mile (780 m) across. The hit was intentional, the culmination of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) designed to determine whether a “kinetic impact” - i.e., hitting an asteroid with a spacecraft - could change its trajectory. ![]() In late September, a 1,260-pound (570 kilograms) spacecraft traveling 14,000 mph (22,530 km/h) smacked directly into a small asteroid named Dimorphos, throwing up a massive cloud of dusty debris.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |