Protect yourself against the threat of an asteroid. This was the goal of the Dart mission that NASA successfully conducted in September 2022 against a large pebble making its way into the cosmos. Six months later, five scientific articles published in the journal Nature on Thursday gave more details on this planetary defense mission, reports TF1 Info.

The Dart probe had been propelled by NASA at 6 km per second against its target: Dimorphos. The 151 m diameter asteroid orbited an even larger space object, Didymos. As a result, the orbital period of Dimorphos around Didymos has been reduced by more than 33 minutes. The probe hit in the right place, "a point located about 25 m from the center of the asteroid, thus maximizing the force of its impact," explains researcher Carolyn Ernst in one of the studies.


New science results confirm our #DARTMission's asteroid deflection technology can be an effective way to change the orbit of an asteroid, should there ever be a threat. The DART spacecraft intentionally slammed into asteroid Dimorphos in Sept. 2022: https://t.co/PdpCDG2zRn pic.twitter.com/79EPIXCaSW

— NASA (@NASA) March 1, 2023

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A very positive balance sheet

Another consequence of the shock: the asteroid lost a good part of its mass. About one million kilos of debris were released into space, a tiny part of the total mass of Dimorphos (4.3 billion kilos). This debris gathered behind the asteroid forming a tail measuring about ten thousand kilometers.

According to the researchers, the change in Dimorphos' trajectory is due to the loss of this debris rather than the impact itself. The results of this mission are positive. "This means that we can quickly design a mission to deflect an asteroid in the event of a threat, and we know that this has a very good chance of being effective," says astrologer Franck Marchis.



By 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Hera probe, which will have the task of assessing more precisely the consequences of Dart's impact against Dimorphos. This new probe will also study the asteroid, in particular by calculating its real mass.

  • Asteroid
  • Nasa
  • Space
  • Probe
  • Sciences