NASA Altered Asteroid’s Shape with Hard Impact
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
In September 2022, NASA did a big test in space. They sent the DART mission to crash into an asteroid moon called Dimorphos, which orbits a bigger asteroid named Didymos. It was the first time humans moved something in space. DART means Double Asteroid Redirection Test, and it did really well, maybe even better than expected. The crash might have changed the shape of Dimorphos a lot.
On September 26, 2022, DART fired its engines and hit Dimorphos hard. The hit was strong. DART was supposed to make Dimorphos orbit around Didymos shorter by seven minutes, but it actually made it shorter by over 33 minutes. Boulders also flew off from the asteroid, seen by many telescopes.
The results were beyond expectations, but it’s important to understand how it happened. Researchers used computer simulations to understand Dimorphos better and found some surprising things.
DART
They used data collected by DART before the crash to estimate the density of Dimorphos and how many big rocks were on its surface and inside. They think Dimorphos is made of loose material, similar to other asteroids like Ryugu and Bennu. These asteroids were visited by other missions to collect samples.
Didymos is a rocky asteroid, and scientists think Dimorphos is made from rocks that came off Didymos as it spins. That’s why Dimorphos acted strangely after the crash. The crash changed Dimorphos a lot, but it didn’t leave a hole like a crater.
Dimorphos is smaller than Didymos. DART hit Dimorphos really fast, and that gave it a lot of energy to change. But Dimorphos is made of loose material, so the crash changed the whole asteroid, not just where it hit. That’s why there’s no crater.
This kind of change is extreme, but it’s happened before. When another mission called OSIRIS-REx touched the Bennu asteroid, it sank into the loose material, kind of like a ball pit.
Hera
The European Space Agency will send another mission called Hera to study the changed asteroid. The researchers think Hera will find a different-shaped asteroid, not a crater. The name Dimorphos means “having two forms” in Greek, and now it’s even more fitting because of the crash.
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