Illustration showing NASA’s DART probe, upper right, on course to strike the asteroid Dimorphos, left, which orbits Didymos. Image courtesy of Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA/AP/Alamy
Joel Kontinen
The DART mission achieved its goal of changing one
asteroid’s orbit around another, but questions remain about why the orbit
continued to alter over the following month.
Space has its secrets.
After NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, its orbit
slowly but surely changed over the next month, and astronomers can’t explain
why.
In 2022,
the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) flew a
nearly-600-kilogram satellite into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, which
orbits a larger one called Didymos.
Before the impact, Dimorphos completed an orbit every 11
hours and 55 minutes. Observations
soon after revealed that the collision had reduced the orbital period by about
30 minutes, but in the following weeks and months, the orbit shrank even
further, by another 30 seconds.
Source:
Alex
Wilkins 2025
Posts
