During the past two weeks, NASA experts have been carefully analyzing all the data collected on the DART mission that at the end of September, It crashed into the asteroid Demorphos on purpose To test the planetary defense capability.
The analysis now confirms the success of the mission and proves it, For the first time in human history, it was possible to change the orbit of a celestial bodysays NASA.
specialists explain itAnd the Before colliding with the DART spacecraft, Dimorphos took 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit Didymosthe other half of this binary asteroid system.
By observations made through ground-based telescopes, it was possible to verify this,After the mission, the orbit duration was reduced to 11 hours 23 minutestaking into account a margin of error of plus or minus two minutes.
Note that, Initially, the US space agency identified a reduction of 73 seconds or more as an indicator of mission success.. The research team is still receiving data from ground-based observatories around the world, including from NASA’s radars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as you can see in the images below.
Click on the pictures for more details
right Now Researchers want to measure the efficiency of kinetic energy transfer from the probe to the asteroid: a task that requires further analysis of debris from the impact, as well as the collection of more information on the surface features of Dimorphos.
in Photos captured by LICIACube, which is a small satellite of the Italian Space Agency, will be one of the main elements of this analysis. The satellite followed the mission at a safe distance of 55 kilometers, taking many pictures along the way.
Remember the photos taken by LICIACube
The first images taken by LICIACube, which reached Earth about three hours after the collision, feature a comparison of before and after the Didymos asteroid system, as well as images of glowing debris around Dimorphos.
In addition to LICIACube, Both SOAR terrestrial telescope (Southern Astrophysics Research), in Chile, How the Hubble Space Telescope captured the effects of the missionrecording the “tail” of dust and debris from the collision between the spacecraft and the asteroid.
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