NASA’s 2024 went from really bad, to so much worse in early August after a study revealed a previous mission may have accidentally sent a meteor shower directly to Earth.
Remember in September 2022 when NASA decided to alter the trajectory of an asteroid called Dimorphos as part of humanity’s “first planetary defense experiment?” Well, get ready to puke up some irony because the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) may have gone to crap. Not only was NASA successful at altering the trajectory of Dimorphos, but within a year the asteroid was acting so weirdly, a new mission was launched to figure out why.
A study uploaded to the preprint arXiv server, accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal, shows the collision sent a plume of debris into space. Some of that debris includes huge boulders, which researchers think are heading our way.
Big Asteroid Discovered 2 Days Before Flying Closer To Earth Than The Moon https://t.co/is4E3eBssh
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 12, 2024
Thankfully, the bigger bits shouldn’t hit Earth as Mars will take the brunt of the blast. But those roughly three million smaller fragments may still end up in our Earth-moon system. (RELATED: NASA Notes Five ‘Potentially Hazardous Asteroids’ Heading Our Way For Valentines Day)
“If these ejected Dimorphos fragments reach Earth, they will not pose any risk,” the study’s lead author Eloy Pena-Asensio, told University today. “Their small size and high speed will cause them to disintegrate in the atmosphere, creating a beautiful luminous streak in the sky.” The debris likely won’t hit us for at least another seven years, but that is also plenty of time for things to change.
KAY SMYTHE: “If today was your last day on Earth, wouldn’t you want to shower the people you love with affection?” https://t.co/doiloVsafh
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 25, 2023
The purpose of DART is to protect Earth, so do these results mean the mission was a failure? Technically, no. The purpose was to smash into Dimorphos and change its trajectory. But DART didn’t exactly protect us from anything. If these data are correct, NASA may have narrowly avoided giving humans the dinosaur treatment (ie: blowing us into extinction with an asteroid). (RELATED: If The Largest Asteroid Near Earth Hit Us, Here’s What It Would Look Like)
NASA is dealing with a bit of a crapstorm right now as two of their astronauts are stranded on the International Space Station with no means of getting back to Earth. NASA teamed up with Boeing to build the spacecraft but are now turning to Elon Musk’s Starlink to save their souls, according to Bloomberg.
We’ve some time before the long-term results of this mission are available, so I say we err on the side of positivity. At least now we know we can alter the trajectory of an asteroid. We just need to figure out how to do it with a little more safety in future.
