Mission that deflected asteroid didn't go as planned

Things get more complicated for future missions designed to deflect an asteroid . NASA's DART mission, which impacted the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022 , successfully altered the asteroid's orbit , but also produced a large quantity of boulders and rocks hurled into space at a speed three times faster than the probe itself . This debris produced unexpected forces that in turn altered the asteroid's orientation and which will now have to be taken into account .

This is the finding of a study led by the University of Maryland and published in The Planetary Science Journal, analyzing images obtained by LiciaCube , the small Italian probe that documented the seconds following the impact . Many Italian researchers from the Italian Space Agency, the National Institute for Astrophysics, the Parthenope University of Naples and the University of Bologna, the Polytechnic University of Milan, and the Nello Carrara Institute of Applied Physics in Sesto Fiorentino participated in the analysis.

"We've successfully deflected an asteroid from its orbit," says Tony Farnham, who led the team. "Our research shows that while the direct impact of the DART probe caused this change, the ejected rocks provided an additional push that was almost as powerful . This factor," Farnham emphasizes, " changes the physics we need to consider when planning these types of missions ."

Using LiciaCube images, the study's authors were able to track 104 rocks as they moved away from Dimorphos, reaching speeds of up to 52 meters per second . They noted that they were grouped into two distinct clusters . According to the researchers, some were perhaps shattered by the spacecraft's solar panels just before the actual impact.