Watch a Nicely Stabilized Video of DART Flying Past Didymos and Slamming Into Dimorphos Video by Spei's Space News, article by Nancy_A
Dimorphos is a small asteroid moonlet, just 530 feet in diameter. It orbits a larger, 2,560-foot asteroid called Didymos. Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth, and the impact should change the way Dimorphos orbits Didymos, making the duo the perfect target for this test. NASA says that DART’s impact demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered.
DART launched on November 24, 2021, and after 10 months of flying about 7 million miles and crashed into the asteroid at roughly 14,000 miles per hour, which is expected to have slightly slowed the asteroid’s orbital speed.they expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1 per cent, or roughly 10 minutes; precisely measuring how much the asteroid was deflected is one of the primary purposes of the full-scale test.
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