NASA will test the protection of the Earth from asteroids for the first time by launching a rocket with a probe to one of them

If you think about it, dinosaurs, for example, did not havespace program. Generally. So 65 million years ago, the asteroid Chicxulub landed well on our planet, destroying almost all life, including the mighty, feathered lizards, who imagined themselves to be the masters of the Earth. And if we do not want us to suffer the same fate as prehistoric monsters, we need to come up with something. Jokes aside, but our planet really is in outer space. Of course, the solar system does not rush about it is not clear where, every now and then crashing into cosmic bodies along the way. And yet, sometimes guests "come" to us. For example, the asteroid Oumuamua, which some believed to be an alien ship (it is not), turned out to be the first interstellar guest in our area. At least in our memory or from the beginning of astronomical observations. And although no asteroid will pose any threat to Earth for the next hundred years (as far as NASA researchers know), if such a threat is found, the agency will try to strike at it and change its course, rather than destroy it. So it looks like Earthlings will have real space protection. But the new simulation shows that when a DART mission hits a target asteroid, it can make it behave chaotically - spinning and wobbling sharply.

NASA Researchers Will Launch A Rocket To Deflect An Asteroid In November, Demonstrating 'Planetary Defense' Technologies For The First Time

Content

• 1 First attack: asteroid Dimorfos
• 2 How to change the shape and behavior of an asteroid?
• 3 Computer simulation: the DART mission
• 4 Five Years Later: The Hera Mission

First attack: asteroid Dimorfos

One of the smallest astronomicalthe object known to mankind is the small asteroid Dimorfos - its diameter is only 170 meters. Discovered this small object in 1996, but the official name was approved eight years later.

Interestingly, in 2003 astronomers fromObservatories in the Czech Republic have discovered that this tiny asteroid has a satellite orbiting around it. Astronomers subsequently confirmed their discovery based on Doppler radar images at Arecibo.

Dimorphos is the smaller of two asteroids in the same orbit. Its diameter is approximately 170 m, which is comparable to the pyramid of Cheops.

Thus, Dimorfos is not only the mosta small asteroid, but also a binary system. But that's not all - being the size of a stadium, Dimorfos orbits a much larger asteroid called Didyma. By the way, the word Dimorphos comes from the Greek Dimorphos, which means "having two forms" and now literally reflects the essence of the new NASA mission:

Targeting the DART and Hera space missions(mission of the European Space Agency), the asteroid Dimorfos will become the first celestial body in space history, the shape of which will change significantly as a result of human intervention (DART strike). As the researchers later explained, the changes in the asteroid will be known in two very different forms: first before the DART impact, and then - several years later - in the Hera lens.

Double Challenge Mission Startan asteroid redirection (DART) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for November 23 (or late February 2022). According to the agency, DART will target the "near-Earth asteroid Dimorfos and its satellite" in order to alter its motion. “We're going to make sure that the rock from space doesn't send us back to the Stone Age,” the space agency told reporters.

Dimorphos is not only the smallest asteroid, but also a binary system

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How to change the shape and behavior of an asteroid?

As noted in NASA, to achieve the goalit will take a year. The plan is to hit Dimorfos at 6.5 kilometers per second using the car-sized DART spacecraft, altering its nearly 12-hour orbit around Didim by a few minutes. The European Space Agency (ESA) Hera mission, which will arrive at its destination in five years, will test whether the "strike" has worked.

Astronomers believe that the blow will have onlysmall impact on orbit, but this should be enough to deflect the asteroid in the future - provided that the impact is struck far enough and in advance. “To be able to prevent a truly catastrophic natural disaster, we want to test our own strength with DART and Hera,” said Tom Statler, DART Program Scientist, NASA.

Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets that orbit within 48 million kilometers of Earth.

Interestingly, potential orbital changesDimorphos has been well studied. But until now we knew little about what exactly would happen to the asteroids themselves after the impact. To find out, the researchers carried out work, the results of which were presented in the scientific journal Icarus.

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Computer Simulation: DART Mission

In progress, researchers from the UniversityMaryland modeled how a DART impact could change the rotation of Dimorphos by calculating how the impact momentum would change the asteroid's behavior. It turned out that the results can be impressive: "The asteroid can start tumbling and come into a chaotic state." This came as a real surprise to the team - the unexpected rotation of the asteroid poses some interesting problems.

In particular, it will make it much more difficult to land onDimorfos, which ESA hopes to carry out with two small spacecraft as part of the Hera mission. It could also complicate future attempts to deflect an asteroid heading towards Earth, as any rotation can affect the asteroid's trajectory in space.

So when NASA DART crashes intoDimorfos, the impact energy will be comparable to the explosion of three tons of TNT and send thousands of fragments into space. The study authors note that the force of the impact will not cause any immediate changes in the asteroid's rotation. Everything will start to change within a few days.

The rehearsal for saving the Earth from asteroids looks like this

More on the subject: China is developing huge satellites to save Earth from the asteroid Bennu

At first, a small asteroid will start very slightlyswing. This wobble will grow and grow as the momentum from the impact knocks Dimorphos's spin out of balance to slow it down. Then Dimorphos can begin to rotate in one direction or another or along its long axis. For an observer on Didim looking at the sky, this seemingly calm companion will take on a new form and begin to sway, revealing its previously invisible sides to amazed spectators.

Over the next few weeks, Dimorfoscan rotate so strongly that it turns into a chaotic tumbling state and begins to rotate uncontrollably around its axes. However, what exactly happens during a real mission will depend on several things.

So, the very form of Dimorphos plays an important role -being more elongated rather than spherical, it will rotate more chaotically. Radar observations so far show that the asteroid is elongated, but whether or not we will know whether it is only after DART is scheduled to crash into this cosmic body.

The first-of-its-kind space mission will reveal if we will be able to reflect an asteroid from the planet in the future

The impact location also matters.DART will target the center of Dimorphos to give the asteroid strength and change its orbit. But the more the blow is off-center, the more chaotic the result will be (and the rotation of Dimorphos). And yet, in most scenarios, Dimorfos begins to sway or tumble abruptly - over the course of several weeks.

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Five Years Later: The Hera Mission

Five years later to our little asteroidthe Hera mission will arrive. And this scene can turn out to be very dramatic: Dimorphos will revolve madly in its orbit around Didymos - as a result of our intervention. It will likely be decades or even centuries before Didymos's gravitational pull returns Dimorphos to its original, presumably tidal state.

The possibility of ESA detecting Dimorphos in a chaotic tumbling state is really interesting and really exciting, the researchers note.

But only the arrival of Hera will be the only wayfind out for sure what will happen to the asteroid - Dimorphos is too small to be properly seen from Earth. To capture the historic event, a small Italian-made satellite called LICIACube will be deployed before the DART strike and during the event itself. But only for a few minutes, and this is not long enough to observe the fluctuations in the motion of a small space object.

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During the ESA mission, it is also planned to deploytwo small satellites that will try to land on the surface of Dimorphos. It is expected that the chaotic movement of the asteroid will not become an obstacle, but will significantly complicate the work. Landing on such a small body is difficult anyway.

Interestingly, the state of rotation of asteroidscan affect other properties, such as the amount of sunlight they reflect, and this can also change their trajectories. So maybe the researchers should take this into account in a future mission to deflect asteroids.

Monitoring the system for many years,decades or even centuries will also give us an unprecedented opportunity to see how the binary asteroid system develops after such a collision. Hera alone will allow us to understand the gravitational relationship between two asteroids such as these. It's pretty cool, says Federica Spototo, who studies asteroid dynamics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

Image: Rossiyskaya Gazeta

This is such an amazing job for astronomers andengineers. Well, so that you can definitely sleep peacefully, recall that British scientists believe that the death of our civilization as a result of an asteroid fall or a volcanic eruption is possible, but extremely unlikely... But about what century can be the last for Homo Sapiens, I talked about in this article. I recommend reading!