Researchers smashed an asteroid with a spacecraft. From the aftermath, they are learning how to better protect Earth.
This article was originally featured on Undark. On a fall evening in 2022, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory were busy with the final stages of a planetary defense mission. As Andy Rivkin, one of the team leaders, was getting ready to appear in NASA’s live broadcast of the experiment, a colleague posted a photo of a pair of asteroids: the half-mile-wide Didymos and, orbiting around it, a smaller one called Dimorphos, taken about 7 million miles from Earth.
was designed to validate a technique and specific situations would inevitably require adapting things,” said Rivkin. Researchers use data from excavated over estimated ten thousand tons of material. The plume of debris, in turn, acted like a rocket thruster, providing an extra push in the opposite direction, slowing the asteroid. So, although the asteroid’s void spaces may have absorbed some of the
. Rubble pile asteroids like Dimorphos are thought to be bound together with very weak forces and mostly gravity, making them easier to break apart than a single boulder. Visual: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Joshua Diaz Sabina Raducan, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, cautioned, though, that care must be taken if kinetic impactors ever need to be used on smaller rubble piles.
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