'It's like if you damaged your wristwatch and it would start running a little bit fast. You might not notice it in the first day or two.'
appears like a single tiny dot of light amid a star-studded sky. The dot periodically brightens and dims as the 525-foot-wide asteroid moonlet Dimorphos moves around the larger, 2,560-foot-wide Didymos, temporarily eclipsing it.
impact. The asteroid is expected to get pushed closer to Didymos, speeding up its orbital period by up to several minutes. But nobody knows when exactly this acceleration and subsequent orbital shortening will be observable . "It's like if you damaged your wristwatch and it started running a little bit fast," Tom Statler, the DART program scientist at NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office said in a European Space Agency's news conference on Sept. 15.
The catch is that the DART mission scientists have only a very rough idea how big of a change the impact will produce. That's because they know very little about Dimorphos. The effectiveness of the impact will depend to a large degree on the properties of Dimorphos that are not yet known — for example, the asteroid's density and internal structure .
"The telescopes will be watching the timing of the eclipses, when Dimorphos goes in front of Didymos, as we see it from Earth," said Statler."Within a few days or weeks, we would see that those start happening off-schedule. I personally would be surprised if a month went by and we did not have a clear detection of that change. But we can't say exactly.
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