NASA in its first test of planetary defence technology has planned to launch a spacecraft to strike the asteroid moon Dimorphos in this September as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.
As per new research studying DART’s impact on the target, it would be much more serious than previously predicted by researchers.
Dimorphos is a small moon that orbits a bigger body ‘Didymos’ in a binary asteroid system that consists of the asteroid Dimorphos. These asteroids were chosen by NASA since they do not threaten Earth in any way.
Researchers owe this discovery to the Japanese space agency JAXA’s Hayabusa2 asteroid sample, a return mission, that researchers claim shows asteroids having a loose inner structure. This is in contrast to the older models that assumed Dimorphos having a strong core.
Structure of Dimorphos
According to Chaitanya Giri, a Space Tech Consultant, studies have been made on the Dimorphos-Didymos binary asteroids for a very long time. He said that Didymos, the larger of the two, has “surface reflective properties that indicate it to be a stony (S-type) asteroid.”
Giri further explained that S-type asteroids can now also contain debris fields. JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 visited the asteroid Itokawa, an S-type debris field. Giri also explained that the asteroid had a structure like a peanut with various densities.
Giri has crucially taken notice of the binary asteroids having similar configurations. Therefore, it is possible that Dimorphos and Didymos are almost similar.
Dimorphos’ inner part is a jumble of debris, and Sabina Raducan’s modelling demonstrates that a DART spacecraft travelling at a speed of about 24,000 kph might totally distort the asteroid as well as deflect the target far more powerfully.
The future impact
With DART’s spacecraft traveling at a speed of 24,000 kph the spacecraft, according to Sabina Raducan’s modeling, might just destroy the asteroid, the inner part of which is a mess of debris, and divert the asteroid with its force.
The impact of the DART probe on Dimorphos, a 165-meter-long asteroid, would not release a lot of substance. DART is the first mission of its sort to study and show how planetary defence works utilising kinetic impact to change the asteroid’s speed in space.
Dimorphos is predicted to advance towards Earth between 2042 and 2062. So now the future scientists would be able to study and analyze Dimorphos before and after NASA’s first mission for it.
