![]() ![]() NASA for years has prioritized detecting asteroids much bigger and more existentially threatening than 2023 BU, the small space rock that streaked by 2,200 miles from the Earth's surface, closer than some satellites. Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, J.WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (Reuters) - The discovery of an asteroid the size of a small shipping truck mere days before it passed Earth on Thursday, albeit one that posed no threat to humans, highlights a blind spot in our ability to predict those that could actually cause damage, astronomers say. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. As Europe’s flagship planetary defender, Hera is supported through the Agency’s Space Safety programme, part of the Operations Directorate. With the Hera mission, ESA is assuming even greater responsibility for protecting our planet and ensuring that Europe plays a leading role in the common effort to tackle asteroid risks. In response NASA oversaw the DART mission while ESA developed the Hera mission to gather additional data on DART’s impact. NASA and ESA worked together in the early 2000s to develop asteroid monitoring systems, but recognised there was a missing link in the chain between asteroid threat identification and ways of addressing that threat. ![]() Just like Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s DART and ESA’s Hera missions are great examples of what international collaboration can achieve the two missions are supported by the same teams of scientists and astronomers, and operate via an international collaboration called AIDA - the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment. Hera will turn the grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defence technique that might one day be used for real. Hubble also recorded the tail splitting in two for a few days.ĭue to launch in October 2024, ESA’s Hera mission will perform a detailed post-impact survey of the target asteroid Dimorphos. This stretches out into a debris train where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid. Hubble next captures the debris being swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles. The pinwheel is tied to the gravitational pull of the companion asteroid, Didymos. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The dynamic interaction within the binary system started to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern. The ejecta forms a largely hollow cone with long, stringy filaments.Īt about 17 hours after the collision the debris pattern entered a second stage. Debris flies away from the asteroid, moving in with a range of speeds faster than four miles per hour (fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull, so it does not fall back onto the asteroid). The first post-impact snapshot is two hours after the event. The thin, straight spikes projecting away from the centre (and seen in later images) are artefacts of Hubble’s optics. In this view both Didymos and Dimorphos are within the central bright spot even Hubble can’t resolve the two asteroids separately. The Hubble movie starts at 1.3 hours before impact. The movie shows three overlapping stages of the aftermath of the crash: the formation of an ejecta cone, the spiral swirl of debris caught up along the asteroid’s orbit about its companion asteroid, and the tail swept behind the asteroid by the pressure of sunlight. The Hubble movie provides invaluable new clues into how the debris was dispersed into a complex pattern in the days following the impact. Smashing head-on into the asteroid at 21 000 kilometres per hour, the DART impactor blasted over 900 000 kilograms of dust off of the asteroid. Hubble’s resulting time-lapse movie of the aftermath of the collision reveals surprising and remarkable changes as dust and chunks of debris were flung into space from the wounded asteroid. Though Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, data from the mission could help inform researchers how to potentially change an asteroid’s path away from Earth, if ever necessary. ![]() The primary objective of the NASA mission, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of rapid changes to the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 545-kilogram spacecraft on 26 September 2022. ![]()
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