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A slew of new studies analyzing NASA’s mission to punch an asteroid off-course have confirmed that humanity now has a viable tool to defend our home planet against a devastating impact. 

On September 26, 2022, humanity altered the course of a celestial object for the first time in history by deliberately crashing a spacecraft into a small “moonlet” asteroid that orbits a larger space rock. 

The goal of this wild NASA mission, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), was to inform our approach to defending Earth from any potentially hazardous asteroids in the future, though it’s important to note that there is no known risk of an asteroid impacts for at least a century.

Now, scientists have announced that this DART shortened the period it takes for the moonlet, called Dimorphos, to orbit its asteroid companion, Didymos, by a full 33 minutes, according to a batch of five new studies published on Wednesday in Nature that detail the first comprehensive results from this unprecedented encounter. 

Scientists had predicted that Dimorphos’ period would change by about seven minutes if the spacecraft directly transferred its momentum to the asteroid in a rather ideal scenario, but it was clear soon after the impact that the complicated dynamics of the collision produced a more dramatic change in the trajectory of the asteroid.   

“People may think of the DART mission as a fairly straightforward experiment that is similar to playing billiards in space—one solid spacecraft impacts into one solid asteroid,” said Cristina Thomas, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University who led the study about Dimorphos’ orbital shift, in an email to Motherboard. “However, asteroids are far more complex than just a solid rock; in fact most asteroids are what we think of as rubble piles. If you hit a rubble pile with a spacecraft, a lot of material will be ejected and fly away.” 

“For a perfectly inelastic collision—one solid spacecraft directly impacting the asteroid with no material ejected—the orbital period change was estimated to be seven minutes,” she added. “We calculated a period change of 33 minutes, which is much larger and shows how important that extra moment from the ejected material was to the orbit period change.”

In addition to the findings from Thomas’ team, DART scientists revealed new observations and insights about the impact in the Nature package. Taken together, the five studies offer important lessons about the potential to use a kinetic impactor, like DART, to redirect the trajectories of any asteroids that might end up on a collision course with Earth.

Researchers led by Terik Daly, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, provided a point-by-point reconstruction of DART’s approach, impact, and fallout on Dimorphos, and concluded that “the resulting change in Dimorphos's orbit demonstrates that kinetic impactor technology is a viable technique to potentially defend Earth if necessary,” according to the team’s study.

Jian-Yang Li, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute, led research on the Hubble Space Telescope’s observations of the crash, and its aftereffects, that provide “a framework for understanding the fundamental mechanisms acting on asteroids disrupted by natural impact,” according to the study.

Scientists led by Andrew Cheng, chief scientist for planetary defense at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, reported “the first determination of the momentum transferred to an asteroid by kinetic impact,” according to their study. Cheng’s team confirmed that the material ejected by DART’s impact produced a recoil effect that contributed much more to the change in Dimorphos’ orbit than the actual crash.

“That ejected material carries energy and, most importantly, momentum,” Thomas explained in her email. “The period change that we observe is not just the result of the momentum transfer from the impacting spacecraft, but also due to that extra momentum boost from the motion of the ejected material.”

Last, scientists led by Ariel Graykowski, a postdoctoral fellow at the not-for-profit SETI institute, “report optical observations of Dimorphos before, during, and after the impact, from a network of citizen science telescopes across the world” in their study. These observations expose the colors and brightness of the impact and its aftermath over several weeks, which is data that will help inform any future kinetic impact missions.

The new studies offer the first extensive lessons from a mission that literally moved an astronomical object and created a roadmap to protecting Earth from asteroids that might threaten to destroy cities, countries, or even life on a planetary scale, similar to the rock that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs some 66 million years ago.  

To that end, scientists will continue to monitor Dimorphos’ new properties, including its orbit and the long trail of debris produced by the impact. These observations will be collected both from Earth and with future space missions, such as the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft, which is tasked with collecting up-close views of the asteroids by orbiting the system in the coming years.

For now, however, Thomas told Motherboard that the DART team is “thrilled” with these findings, which provide encouraging evidence that humans might be able to divert hazardous asteroids in the future.

“While this is only a single test on one asteroid, this result suggests that we can expect significant momentum enhancement should we need to use a kinetic impactor for asteroid deflection,” Thomas said. “Or in other words, if we needed to use a kinetic impactor we can expect more deflection from the impactor than in a simple collision. This means that we could change an asteroid's path with less warning time. This fact would be so incredibly important if we needed to deflect an actual target.”

“Next, we really need to focus on finding the currently undiscovered near-Earth asteroids,” she concluded. “We need to understand where the potentially hazardous objects are with respect to Earth so that we can know if any pose a risk to the planet. There are currently no known asteroids that pose a threat to the planet.”

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