"We tried our best to find the crack in what we had done," Swift expounded, "but we couldn’t find anything." Though NASA did say in its original post-DART findings that the orbit slowing had a margin of error of plus or minus two minutes, the orbit's change is nevertheless a startling result - though some theories suggest that the impact may have "tumbled" Dimorphos' orbit, or unlocked it from Didymos' tidal forces. ![]() "That was inconsistent at an uncomfortable level." Theoretically Speaking "The number we got was slightly larger, a change of 34 minutes," Swift told New Scientist. Given that the space agency's "minimum successful orbit period change" was 73 seconds, this meant that the DART test, which showed whether or not Earth can smash near-Earth asteroids out of the way, was a resounding success.īut as Swift and his charges at the Thacher Observatory found when looking at Dimorphos' orbit more than a month after the initial collision, the asteroid's orbit seems to have continued to slow down - an unexplained turn of events, considering that most astronomers expected it to return to its original orbit speed pretty quickly. To be clear, changing Dimorphos' trajectory was the point of the DART test.Īs NASA announced a few weeks after the collision last fall, it succeeded at doing exactly that, bringing the asteroid's orbit down a full half hour, from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes.
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