DART mission.

[Paul M]

Well, aint that what happened in the film "Don't look Up"? They broke the comet up and caused lots of small, nasty impacts rather than one great big planet killer impact.

Actually, the images of the target asteroid in the seconds before impact reminded me very much of loose cometary aglomeration. 

What a shame it wasn't captured by more amateurs. Might have only recorded the flare in brightness and not so much of the ejecta cloud, I suspect.

[Laurieast]

Sorry if already posted.

Webb, Hubble Capture Detailed Views of DART Impact

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/webb-hubble-capture-detailed-views-of-dart-impact

Edited September 30, 2022 by Laurieast

[DaveL59]

on BBC news this morning

Asteroid struck by Nasa probe leaves 10,000km trail - BBC News

[DaveL59]

Reports are that DART did work and changed the path of the target

Nasa's Dart spacecraft 'changed path of asteroid' - BBC News

Now we just have to hope that if the big one heads our way that they spot it many years in advance so they can build and send something up to avert a collision...

[Gfamily]

According to a tweet from someone following the press conference, the orbital period has changed from 11h55m to 11h23m - which is 'apparently' about a 3x greater change than expected. 

So - worth doing. 

[Gfamily]

In case anyone is interested in why a head on collision seems to have made Dimorphos orbit Didymos quicker (rather than slowing it down).

 

Edited October 12, 2022 by Gfamily
reduce size of gif

[JimFR]

I think it’s something called C3=0, I’ll look it up,

 it’s a little bit counter intuitive but by slowing it down you reduce the orbital  period.

Good result though!

[Gfamily]

On 26/09/2022 at 21:06, gorann said:

Maybe this is sacrilege, but why do they spend billions on showing what Newton's second law tells us about  momentum and that it is just speed x mass. We all know what will happen, and we do not need an experiment to tell us what we have known for 400 years. Checking Wikipedia would have been much cheaper for NASA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum

Turns out it's a bit more complicated than that...

 

 

Edited December 15, 2022 by Gfamily