NASA’s asteroid deflection test had unexpected and puzzling outcome

After NASA broke the spacecraft into an asteroid, its orbit slowly but correctly changed over the next month, and astronomers cannot explain why.

In 2022 Double Asteroid Refusement Test (DART) A satellite of almost 600 kilograms in a small asteroid, called Dimorphos, which rotates a larger, called DIDYMOS.

Before the blow, Dimorphos performed the orbit every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Observations soon after that showed that the collision reduced the orbital period by about 30 minutes, but in the next weeks and months, Orbit sank even furtherAnother 30 seconds.

Astronomers suggested that this may be due to the fact that the smaller satellite gradually threw some of the stones that were raised by exposure and were not immediately lost, as a result of which the general system lost energy and the orbit to reduce.

Now, Harrison Agrisz And Camilla Chateenet at the University of the Cota -d'Azur in Nice, France, calculated that the ejection of stones cannot be an explanation, because Dimorphos is not enough an array or strong enough to send garbage flying from the system.

“The boulder can fly along Dimorphos, and Dimorphos will scatter it into a wider orbit. This can happen, but this boulder will ultimately return and will come closer to dimorphos again, ”says the Agraza. “Thus, his entire impulse will ultimately return back and will be transferred back to Dimorphos.”

Agrusa assumes that a more likely explanation of the sliding orbit of dimorphos is that the impact made him rotate in a complex way, which squeezed stones and boulders on its surface forward and backward. Frost from these boulders, sliding around and colliding with each other, can produce heat. According to him, the loss of energy, since heat can explain the decrease in the orbit of an asteroid, although the study did not simulate.

“If you move things on the surface, you change the gravitational potential energy of dimmorphos itself,” says Agrisa. “It can be a prospectus in order to slowly abandon the orbit period for a month or so, because it will be a long -lived process.”

Although this emphasizes the difficulty in predicting how the orbits of asteroids change after their blow, this is less relevant for deviation of asteroids heading to the ground, Says Agris. This is due to the fact that binary asteroid systems, such as DIDYMOS and Dimorphos, are quite rare, and this effect is unlikely to occur for one asteroid that changes its orbit around the Sun, which matters for potential exposure to the Earth, he says.

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