An asteroid moving strangely next to Earth confuses scientists
It's been nearly a year since NASA intentionally crashed a $300 million spacecraft into an asteroid. In a first-of-its-kind feat, the agency's Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) vehicle slammed into the space rock Dimorphos at 14,000 mph on September 26, 2022. Dimorphos orbits another asteroid called Didymos, though no object remains in its place. Given the threat to Earth, this feat showed the world that NASA can nudge an asteroid and change its trajectory — an action that could be useful if a future planetary defense scenario comes true.
New NASA research showed that the asteroid that passed unstably near Earth, in early February, had an unusual shape and rotation, which confused scientists, according to what was reported by the scientific magazine "LiveScience".
Astronomers finally got a closer look at a "potentially dangerous" asteroid as it passed safely past Earth. What they saw was a “strangely elongated space rock for an asteroid” rotating much more slowly than expected.
The space rock made headlines at the time because researchers predicted that the asteroid's orbit around the sun, which takes about 621 days, could put it on a devastating collision course with Earth in 2040, but follow-up observations in 2012 revealed that its orbit had been dramatically miscalculated. And it poses no real threat to our planet.
If the new findings are correct, this would not be the first unintended consequence of NASA's DART mission. Over the year since the ill-fated spacecraft perished on Dimorphos, researchers have learned increasingly more about the effects of the accident.
Source: websites