NASA’s asteroid-smashing spacecraft worked—and produced a few surprises

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To test a strategy that could knock a potentially hazardous asteroid off of a collision course with Earth, NASA slammed a spacecraft into a 500-foot-wide asteroid—and the test was a smashing success

, with Hubble images recording a three-fold increase in brightness because of all the reflective dust.

Such a dramatic shift in orbit suggests that ramming a spacecraft into an asteroid to knock it off course is a reasonable way to deflect hazardous asteroids that threaten Earth in the future. Called the kinetic impactor strategy, the method is potentially scalable to deflect much larger space rocks that could cause mass extinctions on Earth, as long as they’re detected early enough.

“In a real emergency, we might need to impart a much larger change in velocity, and the asteroid might be more massive,” Syal writes in an email. “If we needed more than one kinetic impact to successfully move an asteroid off of an Earth-impacting trajectory, a dust-filled environment may be more challenging for navigating a second impactor at the target asteroid.”

 

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Sunying00001 Dear NASA. Slip some false info that asteroids will hit more russian bridges and Mr Putin will be on board firing shit into the sky like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. Except Gandalf kept his shirt on

Qué bueno por los ingenieros del proyecto al lograr tal hazaña, no sería fácil pero ellos pusieron todo su empeño para que fuera un hecho. Felicitaciones !!!

Clicksaver: Few suprises = changed course more than excpected, comet degrades a bit and got tail after the impact

You go just like too dey pull trouble for leg

Although the asteroid initially presented no danger, now it is in fact headed straight towards us.🥳🤪

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