NASA's DART mission in late 2022 proved effective in deflecting the asteroid Didymos' moonlet Dimorphos at high speed. However, subsequent research revealed unintended effects; the collision ejected numerous boulders with significant energy. Researchers detected a clustering pattern among these boulders, suggesting an undiscovered dynamic at play. The findings imply that deflecting asteroids involves complexities that need consideration in future missions, as the potential for energy release and boulder behavior upon impact might affect the overall outcome of such interventions.
"We succeeded in deflecting an asteroid, moving it from its orbit," said lead author and UMD research scientist Tony Farnham in a statement about the research. "Our research shows that while the direct impact of the DART spacecraft caused this change, the boulders ejected gave an additional kick that was almost as big."
Pictures taken by a tiny spacecraft called LICIACube, developed by the Italian Space Agency and which has been hanging around the impact site to assess the aftermath, allowed astronomers to track 104 boulders, which ranged anywhere from 0.6 to 11.8 feet in radius, as they hurtled away from Dimorphos.
"We saw that the boulders weren't scattered randomly in space," Farnham explained. "Instead, they were clustered in two pretty distinct groups, with an absence of material elsewhere, which means that something unknown is at work here."
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