NASA on Tuesday said its historic planetary defense mission was successful after a spacecraft that purposefully smashed into a tiny asteroid called Dimorphos last month altered its orbit by 32 minutes.

At a press conference, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) team explained that before the impact, Dimorphos orbited a larger asteroid called Didymos in 11 hours and 55 minutes — after the strike, astronomers observed the orbital period is now 11 hours and 23 minutes.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted the DART mission captured the attention of the entire world and “felt like a movie plot.”

“But this was not Hollywood,” Nelson said. “We showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of the planet.”

The DART spacecraft struck Dimorphos, an asteroid that weighs about 5 billion kilograms and is roughly 7 million miles from Earth, on Sept. 26 at more than 14,000 miles per hour.

However, does altering it's orbit measured in time mean it would miss our planet if it were on a collision course?

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Something different...

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It's all dependent on how long before impact anything gets detected. If it's a day before, there won't even be a launch. If it's a month before, the accumulated deviation from the impact may not be enough. If it's a year or 5 before, then even the smallest nudge can accumulate enough orbital changes over time to make something miss the planet.

All depends on mass of target, mass of impactor, and time.

It was kind of a proof of concept for this particular type of astroid. Helps obtain data on just what kind of energies are required to alter an astroid that is actually on a collision course with earth (if such a one was discovered). In a basic sense, the answer is yes.

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DP
However, does altering it's orbit measured in time mean it would miss our planet if it were on a collision course?

Negative - it just means we will be hit 32 minutes sooner.

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It is what it is.

It was only 32 minutes, sure but NASA says they can get it to 45 minutes once they pad it with commercials.

The other question that comes to mind is whether NASA accounted for time zones...

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It is what it is.

The question that looms in my mind, is what if the asteroid was going to get very close to earth, but the alteration in trajectory now lines it up for a direct hit. Don't suppose thee would be any lawsuits if that happens, of course.

They only hit the asteroid’s moon.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2022 08:13PM by Carnos Jax.

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TheTominator
It was only 32 minutes, sure but NASA says they can get it to 45 minutes once they pad it with commercials.

Would those be commercials for asteroid cream?

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Hurts like a bastid...

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All depends on mass of target, mass of impactor, and time.

And velocity. Or, more accurately, the square of the velocity given the same mass.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

I imagine a shorter orbit means it is now closer to the larger asteroid (lower orbit), or else their probe hit it from behind and simply made it go faster which is not what my understanding of the mission was.

Without a nearby body for reference the effects of the experiment would be difficult to measure.

You have the earth in an ellipsoidal orbit and an asteroid in another ellipsoidal orbit -- both going around the sun. If both orbits intersect at the same time, then we will have an asteroid strike. If the asteroid can be nudged a bit two or three orbital periods prior to the predicted impact with the earth, then theoretically it can be made to miss the earth because its orbit will have been perturbed just enough.