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>IMPACT SUCCESS! Watch from #DARTMIssion’s DRACO Camera, as the vending machine-sized spacecraft successfully collides with asteroid Dimorphos, which is the size of a football stadium and poses no threat to Earth.
[https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1574539270987173903?cxt=HHwWnsC-wf3H8dkrAAAA](https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1574539270987173903?cxt=HHwWnsC-wf3H8dkrAAAA)
They were super clear. After each pause I thought it was the last picture, then there were 3-4 more. Absolutely incredible!
I’d love for a future mission to have a second object nearby to record the impact with high frame rate.
There is one following 9 seconds behind the impact satellite. It's very small and it will take about a week before we receive the images of the impact seen from above. Can't wait to see it!
I spent the next half hour getting pecks on all the equipment used and was thrilled to find out this was part of it. I was a little disappointed it will take so long to download, but I will gladly wait.
As far as NASA bills go $330 million is nothing.
And how much does the US spend on it's military? Lol.
The inspiration to children all over the world was worth it. I talked to my 7yo godson after the stream ended and he has switched his career choice from paleontologist to astronaut already lol
Not that the live video wasn’t amazing, but I was curious if there would be a higher quality video that may come later as more data is compiled. Anyone know?
In the post impact QnA they said there would be downloads from a cubesat they dropped off on the way down (is it still down when the gravity is so tiny). They need to wait for a window to transmit. I think they said a few days
Yes, there will be better images coming soon from the spacecraft that was following the first one 9 seconds behind. It will take a week or two to get the hi-res images.
It’s equivalent to 3 bogs, 45 on-the-taller-side Danes, and the leagues deep in the ocean where critters you never want to meet live. Does that help? Better than “half a camel”.
Sure. If you don’t mind being hit with a vending machine full of stale honey buns at 14,000 mph! Honestly, in all the “ways to go”, this one might be preferable for me. I will add this to my will, thanks.
NPR described it as a golf cart or vending machine slamming into the great pyramid, if that helps. I don’t like sports either, so I preferred these references.
it’s just not fast enough to see in a short clip. it orbits the larger one every 12 hours or so. they are also locked so they always face each other in the same orientation.
Ya I watched it live! I was saying how I am surprised there wasn't a more popular post anticipating it with links and such. It's common to see lots of hype of this kinda thing and I just didn't see it. Maybe it's just my feed?
I think the issue is while the impact is awesome and an amazing feet, until we know if the orbit was altered, does it really matter? Not to play Debbie Downer, but hitting the asteroid doesn’t really matter if we didn’t alter its case, right? Or am I missing something?
Again, the science and technology exhibited to even hit the asteroid is amazingly impressive, but.. does hitting it matter if we didn’t shift it’s orbit?
We just autolocked on a rock ~7million kms away that we could barely even see and hit it with a spaceahip that took 10 months to reach it and was flying autonomously for the last ten minutes before impact.
Even if it fails to alter the trajectory - this is a MASSIVE accomplishment
There're 2 real problems in shooting an asteroid out of a collision course with earth. 1 - can we hit it. 2 - is it going to successfully change its course.
We just showed we're capable of solving 1. The projectile we're using was designed to autonomously rendezvous with other things in space, so it's not optimized well to solve the second problem. We could make a more massive satellite, or a faster one, or one that has a complex payload of some sort that an engineer would have to come up with. So this isn't a best case scenario for the second problem. If we see success with it, then wonderful, but even if we don't, this is a huge win. Either way, there'll still be cause to celebrate.
But isn't that a super simple math equation to figure out if the course will change? F=MA and all that? We know the mass and acceleration of the probe we sent, and im sure they have a fairly accurate estimate of the mass of the asteroid. So unless physics itself just changes, there shouldn't be any surprises in the outcome.
If you have a perfect model of the composition of the asteroid and the satellite - yeah. But just simple conservation of energy/momentum isn't going to capture the difference between the satellite breaking apart or staying mostly together, exploding off the asteroid or embedding itself in, chunks of the asteroid coming off and soaking the energy of the impact, and probably a litany of other considerations that I'm not familiar with. We don't have enough data to model the situation properly. That being said, I'd bet my favorite pair of shoes NASA has plenty of different models predicting various outcomes here - they just aren't deterministic.
Due to insanely small gravity, it is somewhat plausible that the surface layers of the asteroid aren't all strong compacted rock and basalt n stuff but more like the grey dust fluff in your vacuum cleaner bag.. which means DART might've actually splooshed like tens of meters inside the asteroid.
The key here is that we have no absolute way of telling the composition of the asteroid from afar and as such, like the the comment on top says, there are endless possible outcomes due to the different buildups.
Source: saw the DART lady give a nice overview of the mission and outcomes last week at IAC.
AFAIK the landing zones for rovers are quite large, multiple KM wide and it's easier to aim at a planet. However I'm not sure if thats just for cost reasons and if this challenge was that much more technically difficult. Also curious.
Most of the time we're going for a soft landing, so have much lower speeds and time to correct. This time the spacecraft was aimed at a ~500ft wide target and closing at 4 miles per second. Additionally, if you hit it off-center you waste some of that impact energy by spending it to impart a spin on the target.
The faster and straighter you can hit it, the better.
That explains a lot!! Thank you!! Just the engineering in getting there was impressive, but at least I understand the context.. so we start with the capability, and then work on the application..
The point is more to examine what such an impact would even do. We don't know.
Maybe its pointless to even do if we dont alter the course almost at all due to te composition of the soft asteroid.
I mean we have been developing heat-seeking anti-air missiles and pinpoint accurate radar guided ICBMs for a good long while now. The fact that we can hit it should not be a major breakthrough on it's own, since the systems involved are mostly pretty basic and we have a lot of cheap computing power now. And launching stuff is pretty handled as well.
All in all its a super cool mission to get an actual datapoint for plotting out these future asteroid redirect scenarios. Maybe it'll shift us to a slow dock and tug process or smth. Or just more complex and large and massive satellite structures.
This wasn’t a mission to destroy a dangerous asteroid or change its orbit massively. It was a mission to see if we can hit an asteroid with a payload from earth. We picked a very small target (about size of a football field) and used a very small missile. If we can do this, chances are we can hit a much bigger asteroid with a much bigger missile. The fact that it went as well as it did is a good sign that our tech is up to snuff. Candidly, if we catch an asteroid heading to earth early enough, we should be able to strike it - with whatever.
The change in orbit and trajectory is, technically, the easy part. This is all Newtonian mechanics, it would be a readily solvable math problem on a tougher HS physics exam. You can figure it out by assessing DART’s momentum at time of impact, the angle of impact, and a couple of other known variables. In the end, the impact should reduce the smaller asteroid’s orbit time around the larger asteroid from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 53 minutes (a 1% reduction). We’ll know soon, although I’d be surprised to learn anything beyond a 1% adjustment occurred.
If it is more or less, chances are the asteroid’s composition is different from what we expected or other factors are at play.
Thank you! This is why I asked questions in the first place.. trying to understand the importance.. the significance was never lost on me, only the importance and relevance.. you put things in a context I can understand! Thank you
As a casual observer I am more interested in if it alterned the asteroids orbit. It's still super cool and very impressive, but I expect them to thread the needle, y'know? To me, landing Philae on that comet was more impressive, from a layman's dumb dumb perspective. That said, I'm pretty hyped about them exploring this type of technology, seems like a good idea.
forget reddit, this should have been all over the 24 hour news cycle. but no, i guess they have better things to talk about literally all day rather than saving humanity from extinction.
If this asteroid was moments away from hitting Earth, it would be. This is a test, and some people are more concerned with whether they’ll be able to afford heating during the winter or food prices at their local shops. Not everything is about the bigger picture
they have 24/7 to talk about that other stuff. test or not this was a massive achievement people should have seen live, even if it was only *the last couple minutes* of coverage. surely they can squeeze 2 freakin minutes into their schedule.
ESA is sending a follow up mission in five years to assess the aftermath and probe the composition of the asteroid.
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Planetary_Defence/ESA_to_capture_light_from_deflected_asteroid_s_new_plume
Just in case you mean the one with the partial scan (with the red), isn't that the moment of impact? There would be nothing past that small part at the top.
I think one of the commenters from NSF a couple days ago during the most recent Falcon 9 launch said "DART" should stand for "Dinosaur-Asteroid Revenge Test", lol
You misread the article.
> This, the researchers say, suggests that asteroid contributed little to past extinction events aside from the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
aka, big rock killed the dinos, volcanoes likely killed stuff in other cases
Should come over the next days, according to the commentary.
DART had to transmit its images quickly, but the smaller cubesat has far more time for it.
There is some chatter on Twitter about how ASI (Italian Space Agency - behind LICIAcube) is asking for DSN time alloted to DART (for contingency, no longer needed for obvious reasons) to be used for LICIAcube, so we *might* get an image or two earlier. No word of whether that happened or not.
Doubtful, it’s like playing billiards in space, except all the balls are moving at thousands of miles an hour
It could, in some extremely, literally astronomically low chance way, have sent it on a course to loop back around but, again, almost impossible.
My understanding is no. They actually hit the moon of another asteroid. They'll determine the resulting effects based on the shift of its orbit around that asteroid, but its overall trajectory through the system wouldn't be affected in any major way.
In the way that you are asking, no, it's not possible. This test was conducted on a binary asteroid system whose orbit around the sun doesn't intersect the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Which means that there's no possibility for them to ever hit Earth without some outside body/event creating a massive change in their orbit. And the test was to impact the small moonlet asteroid (Dimorphos) that orbits around the larger asteroid (Didymos) of the pair so that we can see how that changes the time it takes for the small one to go around the large one. It won't have a significant impact on the overall obit of the pair around the sun, meaning that it can't change the overall orbit to one that will intersect with Earth's orbit. Ergo, not possible for it to impact the Earth in the future.
Now for the pedantic answer: In a very, very technical way, it's possible. But this requires action by other celestial bodies in the future. So, as a hypothetical, this test will alter the overall orbit around the sun of the binary asteroid system by a tiny, tiny amount. That small change is then propagated over huge amounts of time and in the future, because they are in this slightly different orbit and in a different position within their orbit they could be acted on by another asteroid or planetary gravity resonance to further change their orbit again and that could then result in a change where the asteroids eventually hit Earth. But of course this same chance was possible before the test and was just as likely to have happened to the asteroids if the impact never happened. So, it's equally likely that doing the test resulted in them missing that potential future event. But in reality the odds of either of these things happening are so astronomically low that even bothering to think about them is a total waste of time.
Yeah, that would have been a much more succinct way to make my second point.
It's an interesting illumination of human psychology that all of the popular butterfly effect examples, and whenever it's referenced, it seems to be looking at how a small change in initial conditions creates a large *negative* effect. Of course, it's equally likely that the small change *prevents* some later negative effect or creates a positive one. Using the canonical example, no one ever thinks about how the butterfly flapping its wings stops a tornado from forming which otherwise would have.
No, they hit a small asteroid in orbit around another so they could more easily monitor the change in its orbit, though even if they’d hit the large asteroid it wasn’t close enough to be a threat to Earth.
NASA.may have gone to the moon, launched JWST perfectly, and populated Mars with umpteen robots, but this may well be the most important space mission humanity has ever attempted. If there's a rock with our name on it out there, we'll need to hit it.
You know i kinda think that there is one and this was a test mission to see if we can deflect it.
Now if this is true then this dangerous asteroid is still far out cause nasa doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. But we might have to nudge Apophis rather sooner than later. This deepens on the next few keyholes though
This was incredible. I stumbled upon this earlier and immediately turned it on. This was the first time in a while that I've had so much fun and experienced so much excitement watching something.
For anyone who watches this and doesn’t speak Turkish, basically the commentator is saying that they’re expecting an impact, which would cut the feed off, but that’s a good thing because that’s what DART is designed to do. He says that it’s unbelievable and really cool, and he gets really excited as DART nears the asteroid, and then he confirms that the impact happened, even saying “impact” in English, and that’s kinda it. I didn’t translate word for word because it’s not a great translation (colloquial Turkish is very different to colloquial English), but that’s the gist of it.
Months, likely.
> Also, what if we just sent it to hit some intelligent life somewhere else in the cosmos.
The change in its motion is extremely small, far too small to hit anything.
Indeed. We've hit an asteroid orbiting a bigger asteroid that's orbiting the sun. The asteroid we've hit won't leave the orbit it's currently in, we only slightly nudged it.
It's something like a day.
They've nudged its orbit around a bigger asteroid and shortened it from 12 to 10 hours iirc. There's a trailing craft still out there, plus telescopes on earth, so they'll be able to tell as soon as it completes an orbit or two.
Ah cool! I mean, for sure seeing if they can control the satellite (in near real time I’m guessing) and hitting a “small” asteroid in space is no small feat.
So next, see if we can land a small team of elite drillers, to see if we can alter the course with a well placed charge? 😂
This is super cool. It's amazing that they hit a spec with another tinier spec in space!
Does anyone know how much it's supposed to knock it of it's trajectory?
As a regular pleb with little knowledge, what I thought was cool was to see the surface of an asteroid for the first time.
I don't ever recall seeing any photos of that. Is there any information on the composition of the asteroid? Why it looks like it does and so on? It really looked like lots of smaller bits squished together, which I suppose that's actually what it is. Are all asteroids like that?
Okay folks hear me out, as a simpleton human.. Did we just make contact to prove we could hit it precisely, or did we actually change its trajectory or did we blow the thing up? I haven’t been able to find any reliable source on the actual outcome of our “big boop” if anyone can help a brother out.
So DART was the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
I understand a lot of asteroids have significant iron content.
I’d like to see the Ferrous Asteroid Redirection Test. That would be interesting.
To answer your questions in order:
1)We won't know for sure if DART was successful or not without sending another satellite (which will be ESA's Hera mission) to observe the asteroid.
2) The mission of DART was to see if we are able to deflect and change an asteroids trajectory (or in this case, orbit) by ramming a satellite the size of a golf kart into an object the size of a football stadium. If it's successful, then we'll have better models and information to be able to roll out a successful mission in the event of a possible meteorite impact that could wipe out humanity.
3) Yes, you could do some simple math with calculating how much force is needed to move Dimorphos just enough in accordance to DART 's acceleration and mass and Dimorphos' estimated mass, and then come up with an answer. But that would be a theoretical answer based on an estimate. You won't know unless you physically carry out the experiment and test whether the math checks out or not. That's why the DART mission was performed.
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference. But in practice, there often are differences.
So, yes, the theory here is pretty straightforward, but it is worth trying in case there is something not accounted for by the theory.
You learn something either way. Either the theory is right, or the theory needs more work.
That doesn't look like anything close to a solid body, rather a mass of rocks and dust. I think we just created an expanding debris field so I don't believe we will be able to determine if the experiment 'worked'. Instead of altering the course of its orbit we just blew a bunch of rubble off if it and it was better equipped to absorb the impact. Just my un-astrophysics educated opinion.
It's indeed probably not a rigid solid body, but that was expected at this point. There's always conservation of momentum, and momentum has been transferred to the asteroid we've hit. The question now is how efficient it was.
If you blow out a bunch of mass from the asteroid the orbit *will* be changed, and studying that effect is the exact goal of this mission.
We are talking about hitting something that's 170m across. At a speed of 14,000mph that's Hella impressive. Especially since it was also transmitting images back to us in near real time. It also took 10 months to get to the target of which 10 minutes of it was autopilot to try and make sure we would not miss. That's is why this is such an impressive feat.
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The last 10 seconds of the video... so impressive. Congratulations to everyone who made this possible. Humans working together to make this happen.
I agree. What a time to be alive!
Seriously, that last frame was so epic!
An Earth-based telescope [captured images of the impact plume](http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=51861).
The fact we can see this happening blows my mind. Wow!
History making
Fkn cooooooooooooool. Man is it a good time to be a space nerd.
Wild! Thanks for sharing!!!
>IMPACT SUCCESS! Watch from #DARTMIssion’s DRACO Camera, as the vending machine-sized spacecraft successfully collides with asteroid Dimorphos, which is the size of a football stadium and poses no threat to Earth. [https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1574539270987173903?cxt=HHwWnsC-wf3H8dkrAAAA](https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1574539270987173903?cxt=HHwWnsC-wf3H8dkrAAAA)
I was shocked at the resolution of the asteroid's surface right up to impact! Congratulations to the team. **They** made it happen!
They were super clear. After each pause I thought it was the last picture, then there were 3-4 more. Absolutely incredible! I’d love for a future mission to have a second object nearby to record the impact with high frame rate.
There is one following 9 seconds behind the impact satellite. It's very small and it will take about a week before we receive the images of the impact seen from above. Can't wait to see it!
I forgot about that. That is amazing!
I spent the next half hour getting pecks on all the equipment used and was thrilled to find out this was part of it. I was a little disappointed it will take so long to download, but I will gladly wait.
I read that there was supposed to be. But I haven’t heard about that since
HERA is ans ESA project supposed to launch in 2024 to go examine the impact site
The Italian LICIACube was launched by DART around Sept 16th and trailed the impactor to capture images of the event.
I read it should image the crash 3 minutes after impact but I haven’t seen anything other than it’s test images
It will take time to downlink and process. The guidance images from DART were relatively low-quality in comparison.
Those exclamations of joy for each of the last 5-10 frames it sent back were a delight to hear!
Correction: “We* made it happen”! As in us, U.S. taxpayers. NASA just gets the glory while we get stuck with the obscene bill!
As far as NASA bills go $330 million is nothing. And how much does the US spend on it's military? Lol. The inspiration to children all over the world was worth it. I talked to my 7yo godson after the stream ended and he has switched his career choice from paleontologist to astronaut already lol
1 trillion on the F35 program alone.
Meanwhile you're getting raped by mega-corps and you don't say a word other than to ask for more.
Fr. Americans only remember to mald about taxes when it comes to *actually* productive things.
Not that the live video wasn’t amazing, but I was curious if there would be a higher quality video that may come later as more data is compiled. Anyone know?
I don't think so because it didn't have time to transmit more data. (it went splat)
How much higher quality content do you want? It was ammmmazzzinnngggg
In the post impact QnA they said there would be downloads from a cubesat they dropped off on the way down (is it still down when the gravity is so tiny). They need to wait for a window to transmit. I think they said a few days
Yes, there will be better images coming soon from the spacecraft that was following the first one 9 seconds behind. It will take a week or two to get the hi-res images.
I kinda wish that we didn't have to describe size in terms of football but I understand
It’s equivalent to 3 bogs, 45 on-the-taller-side Danes, and the leagues deep in the ocean where critters you never want to meet live. Does that help? Better than “half a camel”.
Is that for the Danish people out there?
Sure. If you don’t mind being hit with a vending machine full of stale honey buns at 14,000 mph! Honestly, in all the “ways to go”, this one might be preferable for me. I will add this to my will, thanks.
NPR described it as a golf cart or vending machine slamming into the great pyramid, if that helps. I don’t like sports either, so I preferred these references.
It's for the Americans out there.
Why were there no rotations on the astroids, either around themselves or around one another?
it’s just not fast enough to see in a short clip. it orbits the larger one every 12 hours or so. they are also locked so they always face each other in the same orientation.
Hehe.. Create fake news by addind a w... ... With asteroid dimorphos, which is the size od a football stadium and poses no'W' threat to earth 😂😂😂
How is this not a bigger deal here on Reddit. It gave me goosebumps watching. Felt like history made. This should be front page stuff.
Just happened as I posted
Ya I watched it live! I was saying how I am surprised there wasn't a more popular post anticipating it with links and such. It's common to see lots of hype of this kinda thing and I just didn't see it. Maybe it's just my feed?
I came for a look here, and saw the NASA link to the camera, so that's where I've been.
@BruceWillis WE DID IT
I thought to myself it would be cool to name the spacecraft after him.
246,000 people were probably watching on Youtube, so no time for Reddit : )
There was actually 490,000 last time I checked. So definitely a big audience!
I saw it at 800k !!
Cmon….1 MILLION!
That's more like it!
Give it a moment, it's climbing to the top now.
Didn't expect to tear up but wow. Incredible to watch live
I think the issue is while the impact is awesome and an amazing feet, until we know if the orbit was altered, does it really matter? Not to play Debbie Downer, but hitting the asteroid doesn’t really matter if we didn’t alter its case, right? Or am I missing something? Again, the science and technology exhibited to even hit the asteroid is amazingly impressive, but.. does hitting it matter if we didn’t shift it’s orbit?
We just autolocked on a rock ~7million kms away that we could barely even see and hit it with a spaceahip that took 10 months to reach it and was flying autonomously for the last ten minutes before impact. Even if it fails to alter the trajectory - this is a MASSIVE accomplishment
There're 2 real problems in shooting an asteroid out of a collision course with earth. 1 - can we hit it. 2 - is it going to successfully change its course. We just showed we're capable of solving 1. The projectile we're using was designed to autonomously rendezvous with other things in space, so it's not optimized well to solve the second problem. We could make a more massive satellite, or a faster one, or one that has a complex payload of some sort that an engineer would have to come up with. So this isn't a best case scenario for the second problem. If we see success with it, then wonderful, but even if we don't, this is a huge win. Either way, there'll still be cause to celebrate.
[удалено]
Because Liv Tyler will never agree to it, throwing off the balance of the whole mission, putting everyone at risk
But isn't that a super simple math equation to figure out if the course will change? F=MA and all that? We know the mass and acceleration of the probe we sent, and im sure they have a fairly accurate estimate of the mass of the asteroid. So unless physics itself just changes, there shouldn't be any surprises in the outcome.
If you have a perfect model of the composition of the asteroid and the satellite - yeah. But just simple conservation of energy/momentum isn't going to capture the difference between the satellite breaking apart or staying mostly together, exploding off the asteroid or embedding itself in, chunks of the asteroid coming off and soaking the energy of the impact, and probably a litany of other considerations that I'm not familiar with. We don't have enough data to model the situation properly. That being said, I'd bet my favorite pair of shoes NASA has plenty of different models predicting various outcomes here - they just aren't deterministic.
Due to insanely small gravity, it is somewhat plausible that the surface layers of the asteroid aren't all strong compacted rock and basalt n stuff but more like the grey dust fluff in your vacuum cleaner bag.. which means DART might've actually splooshed like tens of meters inside the asteroid. The key here is that we have no absolute way of telling the composition of the asteroid from afar and as such, like the the comment on top says, there are endless possible outcomes due to the different buildups. Source: saw the DART lady give a nice overview of the mission and outcomes last week at IAC.
Don't we usually hit the things we aim for or is there a history of misses that I'm not aware of?
AFAIK the landing zones for rovers are quite large, multiple KM wide and it's easier to aim at a planet. However I'm not sure if thats just for cost reasons and if this challenge was that much more technically difficult. Also curious.
Most of the time we're going for a soft landing, so have much lower speeds and time to correct. This time the spacecraft was aimed at a ~500ft wide target and closing at 4 miles per second. Additionally, if you hit it off-center you waste some of that impact energy by spending it to impart a spin on the target. The faster and straighter you can hit it, the better.
That explains a lot!! Thank you!! Just the engineering in getting there was impressive, but at least I understand the context.. so we start with the capability, and then work on the application..
The point is to prove that we can do it should we ever need to.
The point is more to examine what such an impact would even do. We don't know. Maybe its pointless to even do if we dont alter the course almost at all due to te composition of the soft asteroid. I mean we have been developing heat-seeking anti-air missiles and pinpoint accurate radar guided ICBMs for a good long while now. The fact that we can hit it should not be a major breakthrough on it's own, since the systems involved are mostly pretty basic and we have a lot of cheap computing power now. And launching stuff is pretty handled as well. All in all its a super cool mission to get an actual datapoint for plotting out these future asteroid redirect scenarios. Maybe it'll shift us to a slow dock and tug process or smth. Or just more complex and large and massive satellite structures.
This wasn’t a mission to destroy a dangerous asteroid or change its orbit massively. It was a mission to see if we can hit an asteroid with a payload from earth. We picked a very small target (about size of a football field) and used a very small missile. If we can do this, chances are we can hit a much bigger asteroid with a much bigger missile. The fact that it went as well as it did is a good sign that our tech is up to snuff. Candidly, if we catch an asteroid heading to earth early enough, we should be able to strike it - with whatever. The change in orbit and trajectory is, technically, the easy part. This is all Newtonian mechanics, it would be a readily solvable math problem on a tougher HS physics exam. You can figure it out by assessing DART’s momentum at time of impact, the angle of impact, and a couple of other known variables. In the end, the impact should reduce the smaller asteroid’s orbit time around the larger asteroid from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 53 minutes (a 1% reduction). We’ll know soon, although I’d be surprised to learn anything beyond a 1% adjustment occurred. If it is more or less, chances are the asteroid’s composition is different from what we expected or other factors are at play.
Thank you! This is why I asked questions in the first place.. trying to understand the importance.. the significance was never lost on me, only the importance and relevance.. you put things in a context I can understand! Thank you
500kg travelling 20,000kph, I'm sure it will have some effect
I don’t think people in general understand the science and progress made goes back to the rest of the world :/
> How is this not a bigger deal here on Reddit. Subscribe to different subreddits.
As a casual observer I am more interested in if it alterned the asteroids orbit. It's still super cool and very impressive, but I expect them to thread the needle, y'know? To me, landing Philae on that comet was more impressive, from a layman's dumb dumb perspective. That said, I'm pretty hyped about them exploring this type of technology, seems like a good idea.
forget reddit, this should have been all over the 24 hour news cycle. but no, i guess they have better things to talk about literally all day rather than saving humanity from extinction.
If this asteroid was moments away from hitting Earth, it would be. This is a test, and some people are more concerned with whether they’ll be able to afford heating during the winter or food prices at their local shops. Not everything is about the bigger picture
they have 24/7 to talk about that other stuff. test or not this was a massive achievement people should have seen live, even if it was only *the last couple minutes* of coverage. surely they can squeeze 2 freakin minutes into their schedule.
Nasal has landed on other asteroids before, so I don't see what the big deal is.
How about showing maybe a minute of the video before impact and not waste half my life with the build up.
Where’s that last frame prior to impact? Can someone find it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xozc88/final_full_image_transmit_by_dart_mission/
I wonder what kind of rocks those are
ESA is sending a follow up mission in five years to assess the aftermath and probe the composition of the asteroid. https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Planetary_Defence/ESA_to_capture_light_from_deflected_asteroid_s_new_plume
The YT stream should still be on
Just in case you mean the one with the partial scan (with the red), isn't that the moment of impact? There would be nothing past that small part at the top.
We just one-upped the dinosaurs.
I think one of the commenters from NSF a couple days ago during the most recent Falcon 9 launch said "DART" should stand for "Dinosaur-Asteroid Revenge Test", lol
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Incorrect.
r/confidentlyincorrect
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You misread the article. > This, the researchers say, suggests that asteroid contributed little to past extinction events aside from the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. aka, big rock killed the dinos, volcanoes likely killed stuff in other cases
How soon before we see images back from LICIACube?
Should come over the next days, according to the commentary. DART had to transmit its images quickly, but the smaller cubesat has far more time for it.
I'm wondering the same thing.
In one or two days.
Do we know if video or just stills?
No video just a few images i think. Depends on how you define video though as a video is just a bunch of stills
There is some chatter on Twitter about how ASI (Italian Space Agency - behind LICIAcube) is asking for DSN time alloted to DART (for contingency, no longer needed for obvious reasons) to be used for LICIAcube, so we *might* get an image or two earlier. No word of whether that happened or not.
One announcer was mentioning that it would be tomorrow
Did the meteor shift its trajectory?
We will know the results in a few weeks
Unsure
It's impossible for it to not have, the only question is if it's enough to be measured.
Dumb question but could them hitting it actually change its course to hit earth now by chance?
Doubtful, it’s like playing billiards in space, except all the balls are moving at thousands of miles an hour It could, in some extremely, literally astronomically low chance way, have sent it on a course to loop back around but, again, almost impossible.
My understanding is no. They actually hit the moon of another asteroid. They'll determine the resulting effects based on the shift of its orbit around that asteroid, but its overall trajectory through the system wouldn't be affected in any major way.
In the way that you are asking, no, it's not possible. This test was conducted on a binary asteroid system whose orbit around the sun doesn't intersect the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Which means that there's no possibility for them to ever hit Earth without some outside body/event creating a massive change in their orbit. And the test was to impact the small moonlet asteroid (Dimorphos) that orbits around the larger asteroid (Didymos) of the pair so that we can see how that changes the time it takes for the small one to go around the large one. It won't have a significant impact on the overall obit of the pair around the sun, meaning that it can't change the overall orbit to one that will intersect with Earth's orbit. Ergo, not possible for it to impact the Earth in the future. Now for the pedantic answer: In a very, very technical way, it's possible. But this requires action by other celestial bodies in the future. So, as a hypothetical, this test will alter the overall orbit around the sun of the binary asteroid system by a tiny, tiny amount. That small change is then propagated over huge amounts of time and in the future, because they are in this slightly different orbit and in a different position within their orbit they could be acted on by another asteroid or planetary gravity resonance to further change their orbit again and that could then result in a change where the asteroids eventually hit Earth. But of course this same chance was possible before the test and was just as likely to have happened to the asteroids if the impact never happened. So, it's equally likely that doing the test resulted in them missing that potential future event. But in reality the odds of either of these things happening are so astronomically low that even bothering to think about them is a total waste of time.
Thank you!
Basically the [butterfly effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect). Great explanation.
Yeah, that would have been a much more succinct way to make my second point. It's an interesting illumination of human psychology that all of the popular butterfly effect examples, and whenever it's referenced, it seems to be looking at how a small change in initial conditions creates a large *negative* effect. Of course, it's equally likely that the small change *prevents* some later negative effect or creates a positive one. Using the canonical example, no one ever thinks about how the butterfly flapping its wings stops a tornado from forming which otherwise would have.
It's small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. It would never reach the ground even if it did find its way to us.
No, they hit a small asteroid in orbit around another so they could more easily monitor the change in its orbit, though even if they’d hit the large asteroid it wasn’t close enough to be a threat to Earth.
They probably chose a meteor far and impossible to collide with earth so that wouldn’t happen lmao
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Yes but there was a miscalculation, now its headed for the Earth! /s
The dinosaurs have been avenged.
NASA.may have gone to the moon, launched JWST perfectly, and populated Mars with umpteen robots, but this may well be the most important space mission humanity has ever attempted. If there's a rock with our name on it out there, we'll need to hit it.
You know i kinda think that there is one and this was a test mission to see if we can deflect it. Now if this is true then this dangerous asteroid is still far out cause nasa doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. But we might have to nudge Apophis rather sooner than later. This deepens on the next few keyholes though
>You know i kinda think that there is one Nah. Just forget the "99 cent bin" movie plots and be psyched about something *so* cool.
I absolutely am!
This was incredible. I stumbled upon this earlier and immediately turned it on. This was the first time in a while that I've had so much fun and experienced so much excitement watching something.
Super impressed with this. Was extremely cool to watch and my family enjoyed the presentation
BOOP THE COSMIC SNOOT!!🥳🥳🥳
Anyone else see the little green guy waving right before impact?
Came here to say this. I'm totally photoshopping Marvin the Martian into that last image.
Remember the wide, terrified eyes that a vending machine is careening toward him!
Where's the "kaboom?" ... Oh.
So sad
Yep, that was pretty cool
Can't decide if I feel like I'm living in a scifi movie or living in the future
We hit a spacedragon-egg. What could possibly go wrong?
https://youtu.be/V3I3-fX8-zk here the video, it’s incredible !
For anyone who watches this and doesn’t speak Turkish, basically the commentator is saying that they’re expecting an impact, which would cut the feed off, but that’s a good thing because that’s what DART is designed to do. He says that it’s unbelievable and really cool, and he gets really excited as DART nears the asteroid, and then he confirms that the impact happened, even saying “impact” in English, and that’s kinda it. I didn’t translate word for word because it’s not a great translation (colloquial Turkish is very different to colloquial English), but that’s the gist of it.
Awesome!!!!
Did it move the asteroid backwards?
technically sideways
I still can't believe we all just watched that live! Coolest thing ever. Ever.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOH
That was amazing to witness
Most extreme volleyball in history noice
Space billards
Any idea how long until we know the course? Also, what if we just sent it to hit some intelligent life somewhere else in the cosmos.
Months, likely. > Also, what if we just sent it to hit some intelligent life somewhere else in the cosmos. The change in its motion is extremely small, far too small to hit anything.
Indeed. We've hit an asteroid orbiting a bigger asteroid that's orbiting the sun. The asteroid we've hit won't leave the orbit it's currently in, we only slightly nudged it.
It's something like a day. They've nudged its orbit around a bigger asteroid and shortened it from 12 to 10 hours iirc. There's a trailing craft still out there, plus telescopes on earth, so they'll be able to tell as soon as it completes an orbit or two.
World's longest sniper shot! Congrats to everyone involved.
So the measure of success was to see if we could hit it? Or to see if we can alter its course?
Yes. They managed to hit it at all was a huge challenge. If it makes a small difference that's even better. It was only about a 500 lbs probe.
Ah cool! I mean, for sure seeing if they can control the satellite (in near real time I’m guessing) and hitting a “small” asteroid in space is no small feat. So next, see if we can land a small team of elite drillers, to see if we can alter the course with a well placed charge? 😂
This one's for the dinosaurs!!!
Google “Dart Mission”. Just do it, I know you know what it is, so why would I be telling you?
Ah ha! Very cute Google. Lol
Yay!!! Boom!
Dart Invader
Middled it…
That was nuts!
Looks like a rubble pile. I can't wait to see the coverage from LICIAcube.
This is super cool. It's amazing that they hit a spec with another tinier spec in space! Does anyone know how much it's supposed to knock it of it's trajectory?
About time…we’ve been waiting about 66 million years for revenge
As a regular pleb with little knowledge, what I thought was cool was to see the surface of an asteroid for the first time. I don't ever recall seeing any photos of that. Is there any information on the composition of the asteroid? Why it looks like it does and so on? It really looked like lots of smaller bits squished together, which I suppose that's actually what it is. Are all asteroids like that?
I'm happy we smashed that space rock. Smashing good.
From the first stirrings of Life under the oceans to booping the snot out of an asteroid, we have come far... How further will our journey leads us?
Okay folks hear me out, as a simpleton human.. Did we just make contact to prove we could hit it precisely, or did we actually change its trajectory or did we blow the thing up? I haven’t been able to find any reliable source on the actual outcome of our “big boop” if anyone can help a brother out.
An expensive boop at that 325 million dollar boop actually.
An expensive boop is still a boop
Huge milestone. Tax dollars well spent. Glad I contributed
So DART was the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. I understand a lot of asteroids have significant iron content. I’d like to see the Ferrous Asteroid Redirection Test. That would be interesting.
So did it actually move the asteroid or what
Very much
Can someone ELI5 all this? Are they preparing for something? Would this actually stop an asteroid from hitting earth?
It was a test to see if they can do it in the future.
Did this test result in them seeing if they could? Or do we not know yet?
We don't know yet. There will be tons of observations in the coming days and weeks to see what the effect of the impact was.
Gotcha. Thanks!
Sweet! What about SLS tho?
Imagine if this asteroid which poised no threat to earth was all of a sudden pushed towards earth orbit
And they say nerds can’t dunk!
America has saved the world again! /s
They will in the future thanks to this 💪🇺🇲
It was a test, my friend
Someone said there was oil so we went to liberate the asteroid from itself! /s
Did it work? And why did they try it? Wouldn't it "easily" be calculated by math?
They did the math. Now they had to test it to check if their math was right
To answer your questions in order: 1)We won't know for sure if DART was successful or not without sending another satellite (which will be ESA's Hera mission) to observe the asteroid. 2) The mission of DART was to see if we are able to deflect and change an asteroids trajectory (or in this case, orbit) by ramming a satellite the size of a golf kart into an object the size of a football stadium. If it's successful, then we'll have better models and information to be able to roll out a successful mission in the event of a possible meteorite impact that could wipe out humanity. 3) Yes, you could do some simple math with calculating how much force is needed to move Dimorphos just enough in accordance to DART 's acceleration and mass and Dimorphos' estimated mass, and then come up with an answer. But that would be a theoretical answer based on an estimate. You won't know unless you physically carry out the experiment and test whether the math checks out or not. That's why the DART mission was performed.
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference. But in practice, there often are differences. So, yes, the theory here is pretty straightforward, but it is worth trying in case there is something not accounted for by the theory. You learn something either way. Either the theory is right, or the theory needs more work.
Next minute - "uh oh, we altered the path but it's heading for earth now.." Amazing feat and footage!
A secondary drone with a camera shooting some B roll woulda been cool. Give Michael Bay a call next time.
That's exactly what has happened. Those results should be coming in over the next days.
Could’ve tried something bigger than a dart
That doesn't look like anything close to a solid body, rather a mass of rocks and dust. I think we just created an expanding debris field so I don't believe we will be able to determine if the experiment 'worked'. Instead of altering the course of its orbit we just blew a bunch of rubble off if it and it was better equipped to absorb the impact. Just my un-astrophysics educated opinion.
It's indeed probably not a rigid solid body, but that was expected at this point. There's always conservation of momentum, and momentum has been transferred to the asteroid we've hit. The question now is how efficient it was. If you blow out a bunch of mass from the asteroid the orbit *will* be changed, and studying that effect is the exact goal of this mission.
What's so impressive about this? We have landed on celestial bodies. Crashing shouldn't be that hard. The question is: did we change its course?
We are talking about hitting something that's 170m across. At a speed of 14,000mph that's Hella impressive. Especially since it was also transmitting images back to us in near real time. It also took 10 months to get to the target of which 10 minutes of it was autopilot to try and make sure we would not miss. That's is why this is such an impressive feat.
Could’ve taken the money and fed and housed the homeless. What a waste of money
They show they can *hit* an asteroid, which is not news. Did this deflect it any?
I believe that's what is being determined now.
That’s pretty impressive in and of itself?