NASA reveals details of a spacecraft deliberately colliding with a celestial body
The US space agency " NASA " announced that its spacecraft, which deliberately collided with an asteroid last month, succeeded in pushing the rocky moon from its normal course to a faster orbit, which is the first time that humanity has changed the movement of a celestial body.
According to Reuters, the massive $330 million mission, which took seven years to develop, represents the world's first test of a planetary defense system designed to prevent a potential meteorite collision with Earth.
The results of telescope observations revealed at a NASA news briefing in Washington confirmed that the suicide test flight of the DART spacecraft on Sept. 26 achieved its primary goal, which is to change the direction of the asteroid through absolute kinetic force.
NASA scientists said that astronomical measurements during the past two weeks showed that the target asteroid collided near the largest asteroid orbiting it, and that the orbital period was shortened by 32 minutes.
"This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity," NASA chief Bill Nelson told reporters in announcing the results. "It felt like a movie plot, but this wasn't Hollywood."
Last month's impact, 6.8 million miles (10.9 million km) from Earth, was monitored in real time from the Mission Operations Center at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, where the spacecraft was designed and built for NASA.
DART's celestial target was an egg-shaped asteroid called Dimorphos, roughly the size of a football field, that orbited about five times larger asteroid called Didymos once every 11 hours and 55 minutes.
The test flight concluded with the DART crash vehicle, which is no bigger than a refrigerator, as it collided directly with Dimorphos at 14,000 mph (22,531 km/h).
A comparison of pre- and post-impact measurements of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair shows that the orbital period has been shortened to 11 hours and 23 minutes, with the smaller object impacting tens of meters near the larger object.
The result "showed that we can transform a potentially dangerous asteroid of this size" if it's detected well enough, said Laurie Gleese, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. The key is early detection.
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