Dimorphos as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope after colliding with NASA’s DART spacecraft
NASA/ESA/STScI/Hubble
A highschool trainer and his college students have found that an asteroid hit by a NASA spacecraft, in a check run for saving Earth from a collision, is behaving unexpectedly. The discover might have implications for future planetary defence missions.
On 27 September 2022, NASA deliberately crashed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos. The objective was to gradual the area rock’s almost 12-hour orbit round a dad or mum asteroid, referred to as Didymos, and …