Planetary defense test deflected an asteroid but unleashed a boulder swarm::A UCLA-led study of NASA’s DART mission determined that the strategy presents previously unanticipated risks.
So the thing that was meant to be a learning experience turned out to be a learning experience?
Unanticipated? I’m sure I can pull out a very serious and scientific simulation that predicted this exact event from 1979. It’s called Asteroids I think.
Pretty cool they were able to measure the change in velocity of an object 6 million miles away with millmeter/second resolution. Not cool that it only slowed down a few mm/second though
Actually, a few mm/sec is quite a lot. That could easily be more than enough to deflect an asteroid from hitting earth. That few mm/sec will accumulate over the time it takes the asteroid to travel six million miles.
Well you would need the vector to predict that not just the speed (which they likely have, didn’t see it in the article), but pretty cool nonetheless
Sounds like the gravity tug or thruster methods might end up being the better solution.
Was no one involved alive in 1998? We had two movies about this.
No one remembers deep impact
Why is this a problem?
The point is to deflect asteroids decades or even centuries out. If they do that then the boulders they eject will still be in the same gravitational area and will still move with the parent object. I doubt the force of impact is going to send them on completely new courses. And even if they did it’s unlikely that the new course would be the same as the old course, if anything it would be either the reverse of the old course, or a tangent to it.
