Yesterday, humanity achieved a new and amazing first, 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from home.
In the images, the large bright object is the asteroid, Didymos. The delicate, spidering lines are plumes of dust erupting from Dimorphos as a result of the impact. The images should reveal how much of the moonlet was destroyed by the impact, as well as information about its composition.
This information will help scientists then design future asteroid redirection missions, refining the technology based on these results.of Curtin University in Australia. After all, slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid was not just for funsies. The mission was designed to test our ability to redirect any asteroids we detect on a collision course with Earth in the future – something that in the past, has proven extremely hazardous to any life that happened to be hanging around.This is why Dimorphis was chosen, in fact. At around 160 meters across, the asteroid orbits the 780 meter-wide Didymos roughly once every 11.9 hours in a wobbly dance.
In a single object zipping around the Sun all on its lonesome, we might struggle to measure such a tiny change using ground-based telescopes. An asteroid trapped in a well-known orbital period, however, should make for an easier target to study. "From this one impact event, we can learn more about the mechanics of impacts into small bodies, momentum transfer and the ability to use artificial impactors to nudge asteroids out of their orbits,""This hasn't been done before… We needed a large-scale experiment, to get a validation against the real data. This is to ensure that should Earth ever encounter a dangerous asteroid hurtling towards us, we would know what to do.