Technology

59674 readers

3549 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

225

Asteroid behaving unexpectedly after Nasa's deliberate Dart crash (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Asteroid behaving unexpectedly after Nasa's deliberate Dart crash::A school teacher and his students have discovered that an asteroid deliberately hit by a Nasa spacecraft is behaving in a weird way.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Hazdaz 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is one of the more fascinating space stories. The modeling for such an object should be (relatively speaking), rather simple. Something isn't going to speed up or slow down without a force being applied to it. So NASA should be able to model this quite accurately.

[–] Pretzilla 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Guessing it's not perfectly simple because the splatter, dust, heat energy released, oblique angle of impact, etc.

Space Balls colliding are a bit trickier than clacker balls.

{edited to get to say Space Balls}

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Should be relatively simple to work backwards and figure out new stuff that wasn't accounted for, though maybe not with 100% accuracy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You would think that NASA has an ongoing project monitoring it after spending millions crashing a spaceship into it. Not sure why we're hearing this from some high school students.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

They are still watching it. https://phys.org/news/2023-09-dart-impact.html gives much better details on this situation including:

The DART science team is continuing to analyze their data, as well as new information on the composition of the asteroid moonlet and the characteristics of the ejecta to learn just how much DART's initial hit moved the asteroid, and how much came from the recoil.

But now another group of researchers, led by Taylor Gudebski and Elisabeth Heldridge, used the 0.7m telescope at the Thacher Observatory located on the campus of The Thacher School in Ventura County, California to make their observations.

They quite likely already know of this and just have not reported any findings yet, likely as they want to collect more data first and have another launch planned to study this further:

Additionally, another spacecraft will launch in 2024 to study Dimorphos even closer. ESA's Hera mission should arrive at Didymos and Dimorphos in December 2026. Hera will undertake a detailed study of Dimorphos to understand more deeply how the impact affected it.

Just so happens these students published their work first. That does not mean the team behind DART are not monitoring it any more and have nothing further to report or have moved on to other work. Even if that is what the OP article seems be be hinting at.

[–] volodymyr 1 points 1 year ago

smaller pieces which fell off are hard to track while their effect on the trajectory might still be substantial. Small change to the orbit early on makes a big difference after a while.

[–] Absolutemehperson 3 points 1 year ago

Bah, what are we paying those nerds for anyway? Just math it out!