NASA's DART spacecraft is on a mission to crash into an asteroid. Now researchers have modeled what will happen when it does so.
NASA’s DART spacecraft was launched last November on a mission right out of a Hollywood movie plot: to intercept an asteroid headed toward Earth and attempt to knock it off its course. Fortunately, asteroid Dimorphos isn’t really on a collision course with our planet, though it will come close enough to be classified as a near-Earth object, but the idea is to test out the system in case we ever do find an asteroid threatening a collision with Earth.
The researchers found that unlike many assumptions that the spacecraft would leave a small impact crater in the asteroid, it could cause significant damage to the asteroid. The way it will break up depends on what the asteroid is made of, and previous assumptions had been that asteroids have a fairly solid interior. But recent asteroid sampling missions have suggested some asteroids could be more crumbly inside.
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