Wow, NASA DART Mission May Have Completely Resurfaced The Asteroid

and we have some really cool updates and some really cool videos from the iconic Dart Mission by NASA probably one of the most important missions in the last few decades because it basically tested one simple idea can we nudge an asteroid just a little bit so it doesn't hit planet Earth making us go the way of dinosaurs with the answer being a resounding yes not only is this very effective it's super effective with the resul in Collision causing the asteroid to become a Comet releasing an enormous amount of dust in a process which caused the orbital change nobody expected but we've discussed all of this in some of the videos in the description today we're going to discuss additional discoveries and more updates and actually some really cool animation showing us what most likely happened which in the process discovered a little bit more about the structure and composition of this asteroid and even where it most cly came from but first a wonderful person this is Anton let's talk about the dark mission once again and let's start with this the basics so this is dimus and it's satellite demorphis a typical binary asteroid minia which exists in the solar system that represents a near Earth asteroid of the AP poo group that technically makes it somewhat dangerous now it doesn't have a chance to collide with Earth anytime soon but it might in the future the larger object here is just under 800 M across the smaller one is approximately 160 m and so a few years back someone at had this brilliant idea what if we launch a tiny satellite hitting the smaller Moon just to see how it changes its orbit in order to see if this is a viable strategy for the future with the future being basically a large Rock coming toward the planet with a really high chance of a collision and since the orbit of the object was known very well any kind of inability change would be very apparent and would tell us everything we need to know about the effectiveness of this strategy with this basically being a redirect strategy redirecting asteroid by hitting it with something going really fast early enough and surprisingly this wasn't even that expensive roughly around $300 million which is really cheap for a space mission but naturally what surprised everyone was how effective this was here's that famous time lapse showing us the last few seconds right before the collision and so here right after the impact this created an enormous amount of injector which turned this asteroid into an active asteroid or basically a Comet with some of the eject moving as fast as 2 km/s and some of these particles were really tiny but some of them were actually pretty large even Boulder size objects that essentially got ejected in the process and some of the first questions scientist wanted to ask is what exactly happened to all of this material did it all just Escape did it become tiny asteroids or did most of it return here's actually a really cool stereoscopic animation recently released by Isa kind of showing us what the impact might have looked like approximately 178 seconds after it happened and so here some of the first calculations suggested that 3% of all of the ejected borders would still be in orbit after 83 days but the majority of smaller pieces would Escape into the solar system whereas the majority of larger pieces would fall back onto the moon or the main asteroid and so about 8% of the material would land on dimus 6% would land on demorphis but 85% would most likely disappear into the rest of the solar system Al in this case it really depends on the size of the particle smaller particles are more likely to escape larger particles and larger Boulders are more likely to fall back with the vast majority of Boulders just returning back to the morphus or dmus and that actually takes us to one of the main discoveries this Collision did not result in the crater and actually resulted in a complete resurfacing or reshaping of the Moon and not just the moon but but also possibly the main asteroid and that's because once the moon changes shape it actually affected the gravitational environment in the binary system and as a result of this these gravitational influences would then reshape dmus as well and so in other words both objects change their shape and their appearance quite dramatically and the reason for this is really really interesting unlike what we see right here these are not rocks now some asteroids can be rocks but not these ones these are actually very similar to two asteroid Banu and yugu that we refer to as Rubble piles they're essentially a collection of tiny particles and Tiny rocks all held together by tiny bits of gravity but also a lot of electrostatic forces including Vander Bol forces and so it's basically a loose collection of dust all held together as a snowball and if you step on it like what NASA did with the Osiris Rex Mission it all basically just kind of flies apart leaving a really large hole in the middle but if you collect at a much higher velocity things really explode to the point of reshaping everything which is precisely what the researchers were able to simulate by adjusting certain parameters and tweaking certain variables in order to create this beautiful simulation and once they were able to produce a simulation that was directly able to replicate observations from various satellites they could then look at the variables and determine what type of a rock this is so first first of all they were able to discover that the morphus has a density of about 2.4 G per cubic cm actually a little bit higher almost double of ryugu and Banu but much lower than Earth but more importantly they were able to determine that it's extremely similar to its partner dimus and so now it's almost certain that dimus and demorphis came from the same object but more specifically demorphis very likely just kind of detached itself from dimus due to centrifugal force es or due to fast rotation and so in other words this used to be the same Rock but then one gave birth to the other and this is not unheard of and might actually happen to rugu and Banu as well sometimes in the future especially because technically all of these objects are somewhat similar in size and a lot of other properties they actually also spin very fast as well but here we now see what happens to Rubble bio asteroids if you collide with them they don't just change in shape and don't just change or orits here they produce so much ejector that it actually acts as a kind of a rocket engine with the effects from the ejector being dramatically higher than the Collision itself here the orbit was decreased from 12 hours to 11 and 1/2 a dramatic change of 33 minutes in orbit which was something like 50 times higher than expected here's actually the visualization of the orbital change and yeah it was quite dramatic and this is of course a super important Discovery it means that any any kind of a similar asteroid could be definitely redirected if we collide with it early enough and so because dimorphus here lost approximately 1 million kg of mass which then created this propulsion it means that something very similar would happen to any other asteroid on a hypothetical Collision Course with planet Earth and so that means that if there is an asteroid on a collision course that we discover might collide with the planet in the next decade or so we can definitely redirect it by using a similar technique even with a relatively small probe here even a tiny change of a few cm/ second in velocity will dramatically shift the orbit over 10 years completely preventing the asteroid from colliding with Earth now naturally larger asteroids require a larger Collision but it still produces the same effect no need for nuclear weapons no need for anything else although that's of course based on the rubble pile asteroids I think it would be actually kind of important to try this with something a little bit more dense and something containing different typ types of materials although since statistically most of the dangerous apol asteroids or any asteroids in the vicinity of Earth are usually this type at least for now we definitely have a technique to redirect them but luckily in 2026 we might have additional pictures and even more details on what exactly happened to both of these asteroids or to be more exact we'll actually see if the simulation is correct and if there's really no crater and the shape changed dramatically and that's because Isa is going to be launching Hera the spacecraft that will be launched in October of 2024 and whose mission is really a followup trying to see what exactly happened after the collision and whether the mission is really as successful as we currently believe which means that we'll be talking more about Dart and Hera in a lot of future videos but until these future discoveries or until we discover something else that's pretty much it thank you for watching check out some of the other videos in the description below subscribe share this with someone who loves running about space ins science es come back tomorrow to learn something else support this channel patreon by joining Channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always [Music] bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 174,270

Keywords: dart mission, dart, direct asteroid redirect test, anton petrov, education, #education, space, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, science, amateur astronomy, steven universe, could we nuke an asteroid, can asteroid be nuked, is asteroid going to hit earth, can we use nukes on asteroids, astrophysics, can we nuke an asteroid, we can't nuke an asteroid, nuking an asteroid, can asteroid be destroyed, destroying an asteroid, how to prevent asteroid impact, nuke

Id: TEoKMWMlQiU

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024