NASA’s Armageddon mission yields dangerous results: giant boulders threaten the planet

In 2022, NASA proved that humans can redirect city-killing asteroids – away from Earth, but with unintended consequences that could put our planet in danger. A pair of Italian astronomers discovered that when the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) knocked the 560-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphos off course, the impact created a cloud of 37 new cosmic rocks that hurtled toward Mars.

If one of these boulders fell on the Red Planet, it could create a crater with a diameter of 200 to 300 meters – from 656 to almost 1,000 feet, writes the Daily Mail.

Astronomers have warned that if NASA needs to knock a killer asteroid off its collision course with Earth in the future, it will be critical to consider where the debris from such a spectacular crash will go so it doesn’t end up colliding with our planet.

During the DART mission, NASA used an unmanned spacecraft that crashed into Dimorphos at 14,000 mph to see if it was possible to push the space rock out of orbit. In the weeks that followed, NASA scientists confirmed that it had worked: the so-called “kinetic impact” changed the asteroid’s orbit in space.

A kinetic impact means one object colliding with another, and is one possible strategy NASA could use in the event of an asteroid impact that threatens life on Earth, the Daily Mail explains.

Dimorphos is part of a two-asteroid system orbiting a larger asteroid called Didymos. After the collision with DART, Dimorphos entered Didymos orbit in 11 hours and 23 minutes – 32 minutes less than it took the spacecraft before colliding with it.

However, with such a collision, collateral damage occurs. Scientists have discovered that the DART mission left behind 37 newly formed boulders flying through space on a completely different course.

On their current trajectory, these chunks could collide with Mars, study co-authors Marco Fennucci of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Albino Carbonani of the Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Bologna, Italy, concluded.

The boulders measure from four to seven meters in diameter – from 13 to 23 feet, writes the Daily Mail.

According to Hubble Space Telescope observations, the boulders escaped the gravitational pull of the Dimorphos/Didymos pair by taking a separate path from the 6,000-mile-long tail of dust and rocks created by the collision.

And their orbit could overlap with that of the European Space Agency’s Hera mission, which is due to cross Dimorphos in 2026 to take a closer look at the effects of the DART collision.

“All observations made so far prove that DART was a successful asteroid deflection test, as it succeeded in changing the orbital period of Dimorphos and did not create any other boulder that could fall to Earth,” the astronomers wrote.

“On the other hand, the results presented in this paper suggest that future missions involving interactions with near-Earth asteroid surface material must be carefully planned,” they added.

In the long term, these blocks may cross the orbit of Mars, writes the Daily Mail. The Red Planet has a thin atmosphere, so the likelihood that a small meteor shower will overcome it and reach the surface is higher than on Earth. However, this may take thousands of years.

“Numerical simulations show that all swarm clumps will cross the orbit of Mars several times in the future [через 20 000 лет]”, write Fenucci and Carbonani.

These simulations included a computer-generated swarm of 37 new boulders, and astronomers claimed they were a fairly accurate prediction of the behavior of real boulders.

“Therefore, due to orbital crossings occurring during long-term evolution, it is possible that some of the boulders will collide with Mars in the future,” they concluded.

This could happen within 6,000 years, possibly affecting a future human colony on Mars.

Overall, however, the DART mission was considered a success, the Daily Mail notes.

For the first time in history, people deliberately changed the movement of a celestial object. Dimorphos was not on a collision course with Earth, but as a two-asteroid system it provided a unique opportunity to monitor changes in the small asteroid’s orbit around the larger one. This test was proof that it is possible to knock asteroids off course so that they do not cause destruction to the Earth.

If a killer asteroid threatens humanity in the future, that means people will need to be able to divert its trajectory and avoid disaster – they may just want to plan where the debris will go.

The scientists published their findings on arXiv.org, a publishing server for the physics community.