Astronomers are still watching that asteroid that NASA whacked with a spacecraft back in September, in the first-ever test of whether an asteroid could be deliberately pushed off-course.
This imagery from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the debris blasted from the surface of Dimorphos 285 hours after NASA's DART spacecraft smashed into the asteroid's surface.This imagery from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the debris blasted from the surface of Dimorphos 285 hours after NASA's DART spacecraft smashed into the asteroid's surface.
The collision altered the path of Dimorphos through space, shortening the time it takes to orbit another, larger asteroid by 33 minutes, according a new analysis in the journal. The journal published a study detailing the results this week, alongside four additional scientific reports on this unprecedented asteroid deflection experiment.Dimorphos is millions of miles away and about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
"That's the recoil force, an extra force that's pushing against the asteroid," says Cheng, adding that this extra force was actually a lot bigger than the push that the spacecraft delivered by hitting the asteroid and embedding itself inside. "DART is the first experiment that actually demonstrated that impact can indeed generate a tail," he says.
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