By Tim Binnall
Astronomers studying the aftereffects of NASA's recent test of a planetary defense system have determined that the mission was a smashing success as it managed to significantly alter the movement of an asteroid. In late September, the space agency's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) culminated with a diminutive craft careening into the asteroid Dimorphos in the hopes that impacting the small space rock, which measures a mere 560 feet in diameter, would cause a measurable disruption in its orbit. While hitting the tiny target was, understandably, considered a significant achievement in and of itself, whether the mission was able to pull off its primary objective was uncertain until this week when NASA revealed the results of the potentially humanity-saving test.
The space agency indicated in a press release on Tuesday that the DART mission proved to be far more fruitful than they had even imagined. NASA explained that the experiment specifically centered around altering Dimorphos' orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos and their benchmark for success was to reduce that time period by 73 seconds or more. Upon studying data from new observations of the asteroid pair, the space agency was delighted to discover that DART had actually shortened Dimorphos' orbit by a staggering 32 minutes, which is more than 25 times NASA's initial goal for the mission.
Serving as a proverbial proof of concept for the longstanding theory that we could possibly save ourselves from an incoming asteroid by sending something into space to deflect it, Lori Glaze, head of NASA's planetary science division, marveled at a press conference on Tuesday that the mission was a historic scientific achievement in that "for the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary object." The space agency plans to further study the aftereffects of the DART mission in order to develop a better understanding of how this defensive technique could be deployed in the future should Earth be faced with an asteroid that needs to be deflected lest we suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.