Israeli scientists are helping NASA determine whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid is enough to throw it off course.
Researchers from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot filmed the collision with their telescopes from the Wise Observatory in the Negev desert. His images benefited from the low light pollution in southern Israel.
Last Tuesday (September 26), an unmanned NASA spacecraft deliberately crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos. This was part of the agency’s Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and was the first time it demonstrated its planetary defense technology.
In the coming weeks, scientists in Israel and others around the world will determine how effectively NASA deflected the asteroid by measuring how the impact altered its orbit.
The researchers, Professor Eran Ofek and Dr David Polishook, say the debris was traveling at a speed of tens of meters per second.
The NASA craft, which was obliterated in the impact, was traveling at 22,530 kilometers per hour and is expected to slightly slow the asteroid’s orbital speed. NASA expects Dimorphos’ orbit to shorten by 1%, or about 10 minutes.
The maneuver applied to Dimorphos is called Kinetic Impact. Use a spaceship to divert any Earth-bound objects that could have devastating effects on the planet.
Dimorphos, now orbiting about 11 million kilometers from Earth, is a relatively small asteroid with a diameter of just 160 meters (530 feet). It orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos, which has a diameter of about 780 meters. Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth, according to NASA.