It is the first attempt to deflect an asteroid through the impact of a ship that has been sent within NASA's Dart mission, which occurred on Tuesday 27 around 7 a.m. in the morning time in Venezuela.
The retransmission was not easy, because the retransmission occurred almost 11 million kilometers from the earth, the impact of the 500 kg Nasa Dart spacecraft against the dimorphic asteroid, which is a tiny asteroid that is 360 to 170 meters in diameter. and it orbits a larger one called Didimos, about 780 meters in diameter.
This couple forms a Duo, it is a binary system of asteroids and they do not pose any danger to the earth, the objective of the mission is to impact this ship against the small asteroid to try to deflect it a little and in this way check and study various issues from the more basic than the technology to be able to hit a target that is millions of kilometers from the earth, something that is not so easy, as the energy necessary to deflect an asteroid will also be tested.
At the moment, up to 98% of near-earth objects have been discovered, totaling 15,000 objects, there are many more in the asteroid belt, it is believed that there are around a million and it may be twice the number that are asteroids Jupiter Trojans, Trojans are so called because they are in the same orbit as Jupiter only a little forward of its trajectory or a little behind its trajectory.
But what we're concerned about are these 15,000 NEOs whose orbits periodically fall within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit because those are the ones that can pose real danger.
This mission is essential because firstly, the sooner we have the appropriate technology for planetary defense, the better, we must not leave everything to the last day, secondly, because if we know and know where the large asteroids are, we cannot say the same about the small ones those of a few hundred meters that can cause a lot of damage, an asteroid of 150 meters can completely destroy a city and one of those of that size could appear at any time to one there are many that have not been discovered and that from time to time when they can cause us a scare.
The third reason is because we cannot trust Comets are the other great danger, not only asteroids, Comets are very dangerous because a new one can always appear and one that has our planet on its trajectory, although comets, the larger they are more luminous and greater will be the margin of time that we have to act.
To achieve this we need to experiment and we need to carry out this mission, which some have described as throwing a golf cart at 24,000 kilometers per hour against a football field.
There is another ship apart from the one that has impacted, it is a cubesat, a mini satellite and that is the one that is going to give us images of what has obviously happened, the ship that has crashed against Dimorphos because it has been destroyed and we no longer can offer more images than those last photos we've seen of those dimorphic rocks.
From the ground, the detachment of debris due to the impact was appreciated from the Back observatory in Hawaii, the impact has been great and it is estimated that it could deviate it from its natural orbit, many studies and conclusions for planetary defense will be drawn from this experiment.
There will be more images of the impact, since the James Webb observatories, the hubble and the liciacube cubesat that was the one that filmed the impact.
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