NASA confirmed on Tuesday that the impact of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft against the asteroid Dimorphos, located about 11 million kilometers from Earth, managed to divert its trajectory, as planned.
The administrator of the US space agency, Bill Nelson, pointed out that, before the collision with Dimorphos, DART took 11 hours and 55 minutes to go around another celestial body -Didymos-, with which it forms a system of double asteroids.
The probe managed to reduce orbit in 32 minutes.
“It would have been successful if it had reduced it by about 10 minutes, but it actually reduced it by 32,” said Nelson, congratulating himself on the success of the mission in September this year.
DART “successfully” collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, in what was humanity’s first test to defend Earth from future space objects.
The collision occurred at 19:14 local time on the east coast of the United States (00:14, in Lisbon), 9.6 million kilometers away, with DART hitting the small space rock -moon of the binary system also formed by the asteroid Didymos. – at 22,500 kilometers per hour.
The $325 million mission was the first attempt to change the position of an asteroid or any other natural space object.
Source: TSF
