NASA has changed the flight path of the asteroid Dimorph
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The head of the US space agency (NASA), Bill Nelson, said at a press conference that the mission to change the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorph using the impact probe DART was a success.
The device was launched using a Falcon 9 launch vehicle from the Vandenberg launch site on the night of November 24, 2021. And on September 26 this year, a DART probe weighing 633 kg crashed into Dimorph, which has a diameter of 160 meters, at a speed of 6.2 km per second. All this happened at a distance of about 11 million km from the Earth.
Confirmation came in today that as a result of this impact, Dimorph’s orbital period was reduced by 32 minutes and thus its flight path was changed.
This was the first mission in the history of mankind to change the trajectory of an asteroid to protect the Earth from a potentially dangerous collision. At the same time, the asteroid Dimorph itself did not pose a danger to the Earth. He was simply chosen as a participant in the experiment.
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