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NASA ’s asteroid - digression mission may have sent slews of bowlder on a hit course with Mars , a new study suggest .
In 2022 , NASA advisedly crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos in guild to change its ambit , as well the trajectory of the larger place John Rock it circle , called Didymos . The charge , called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test ( DART ) , was design as a sort of airplane pilot program for deflectingpotentially deathly near - Earth asteroidssimilar in size to the one that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs .
A Hubble Space Telescope view of asteroid Dimorphis. Boulders knocked into space during the DART impact are circled in blue.
Scientists considered DART a vast success ; subsequent studies revealed that italtered the smaller asteroid ’s orbit by 32 minutes , and totally change Dimorphos ' chassis .
But the mission had an unexpected result : When the craft collided with Dimorphos , itsent a swarm of 37 bouldersmeasuring up to 22 feet ( 6.7 beat ) flying into the macrocosm .
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A Hubble Space Telescope view of asteroid Dimorphis. Boulders knocked into space during the DART impact are circled in blue.
" We did not expect that many boulders that were that vainglorious to be blown off,“Andy Riven , an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and a member of the DART squad , told National Geographic .
Thankfully , none of the boulder seem poised to mint Earth , but researchers were still rummy where the giant rocks might end up . Now , they may have an answer . In a yet - to - be - peer - reviewed preprintpaper , researcher discover the debris ' possible destination : Mars .
Marco Fenucci , a mathematician at theEuropean Space Agency ’s Near - Earth Objects Coordination Centre and co - author of the new study , cut through the flight of the boulders and run simulation that project their positions 20,000 days into the future . There are , of class , a lot of uncertainties demand in cook such a far - flung prediction . However , Fenucci and his team establish that in most scenarios , the boulders ended up crossing Mars ' field in about 6,000 year .
Whether the space rocksimpact the Red Planet ’s surfacewill calculate on their composition . If they are structurally unsound , they will in all likelihood explode or burn up in the slender Martian atmospheric state , the report authors say . But if they ’re unanimous enough , they will leave a substantive impact crater .
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It ’s crucial for scientists to be aware of the electric potential for missions like DART to establish more debris into space , the field of study cautions . Most of theasteroidsthat researchers will desire to course - correct will be skinny to Earth . Many , including Dimorphos , will be " rubble pile " asteroid — loose accumulations of boulder like those liberated by the DART test . To truly protect our planet , scientist will need to be able-bodied to predict the number and flight of such detritus before launching a DART - like wandering defence missionary station closer to home .
" If you put into infinite more stuff that can impact the Earth , then it ’s going to be a problem , " Fenucci told National Geographic .
fortuitously , this trouble is only hypothetical for now . astronomer take after the orbits of more than 33,000 near - Earth asteroid , and have determine that none of them impersonate a risk of hitting our planet for at least the next century .
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