NASA's DART mission didn't just change the orbit of asteroid it hit
USA TODAY
NASA's DART mission didn’t just change the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid it hit. It changed the orbit of the larger Didymos around the sun.
If an asteroid ever needs to be diverted from a collision course with Earth, a future planetary defense mission may resemble a test NASA pulled off four years ago.
In 2022, NASA's DART mission proved that potentially dangerous asteroids can be redirected from a trajectory toward Earth. Now, further observations of the aftermath of the mission – which entailed intentionally slamming a vehicle into a space rock – is revealing something unexpected in the binary system of asteroids.
NASA's mission didn’t just change the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid it hit, around its larger companion. The crash even shifted the orbit around the sun of Didymos, the larger of the two asteroids located within 7 million miles of Earth.
Because Didymos and Dimorphos are so intricately linked together by gravity, changes to one asteroid's orbit is destined to influence the other's, NASA said in a March press release. And over time, even a small change in an asteroid’s motion could be the difference between a hazardous object hitting our planet or missing it entirely, according to researchers.
"That change marks the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the sun," NASA said in a statement.
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