An asteroid that NASA used for target practice a few years ago was nudged into a slightly different route around the sun, findings that could help divert a future incoming killer space rock, scientists reported Friday
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An asteroid that NASA used for target practice a few years ago
was nudged into a slightly different route around the sun,
findings that could help divert a future incoming killer space rock, scientists reported Friday.
It’s the first time that a celestial body’s orbit around the sun was deliberately changed.
The asteroid that NASA’s #Dart spacecraft slammed into was never a threat to Earth.
“This study marks a notable step forward in our ability to prevent future asteroid impacts on Earth,”
the international research team wrote in Science Advances.
The changes were slight
— reductions of just one-tenth of a second and one-half of a mile (720 meters) to a solar lap spanning two years and hundreds of millions of miles (kilometers), according to the scientists.
“Even though this seems small, a tiny deflection ... can add up over decades
and make the difference between a potentially hazardous asteroid hitting or missing the Earth in the future,”
lead author Rahil Makadia, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in an email.
https://apnews.com/article/asteroid-nasa-draft-dimorphos-9abccd32d4cb532a66249dd6145685cb -
An asteroid that NASA used for target practice a few years ago
was nudged into a slightly different route around the sun,
findings that could help divert a future incoming killer space rock, scientists reported Friday.
It’s the first time that a celestial body’s orbit around the sun was deliberately changed.
The asteroid that NASA’s #Dart spacecraft slammed into was never a threat to Earth.
“This study marks a notable step forward in our ability to prevent future asteroid impacts on Earth,”
the international research team wrote in Science Advances.
The changes were slight
— reductions of just one-tenth of a second and one-half of a mile (720 meters) to a solar lap spanning two years and hundreds of millions of miles (kilometers), according to the scientists.
“Even though this seems small, a tiny deflection ... can add up over decades
and make the difference between a potentially hazardous asteroid hitting or missing the Earth in the future,”
lead author Rahil Makadia, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in an email.
https://apnews.com/article/asteroid-nasa-draft-dimorphos-9abccd32d4cb532a66249dd6145685cb@cdarwin We're going to destroy this planet way before an asteroid will.
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@cdarwin We're going to destroy this planet way before an asteroid will.
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