It was a $325 million dollar project that was intentionally smashed to smithereens in the interest of one day, saving humanity. The DART mission launched in November 2021 on route to asteroid Dimorphos. Its mission was simple, to smash into Dimorphos to see if it may be possible to redirect it from its path. On impact, it created a trail of debris from micron to meter sized objects. A new paper analyses the debris field to predict where they might end up.
DART hit Dimorphos in an almost head on collision and the resulting ejecta plume travelled at approximately 2km/s. The plume had been observed by the Les Makes Observatory and with the Hubble Space Telescope. The debris contained material from dust sized particles to meteor and even boulder sized objects. Just before the impact, the CubeSat LICIACube was released from DART so that it could offer some long term monitoring of the debris field.
The analysis of ejecta enabled modelling to be undertaken to estimate that approximately 3% of all ejected boulders would remain in orbit after 83 days . This estimation was in line with the pre-impact simulations over a 60 day period. By varying the parameters of the simulation they also revealed that 5% of 10cm sized particles escaping with a velocity of 0.12 and 0.18m/s would remain in orbit around the system after a 60 day period of time, similar again to the observations.
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