It could happen in five years: Scientists believe it is possible that the first man-made meteor shower will reach Earth. It should be harmless, assures the European ESA space agencybut centimeter-sized pieces of debris could burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. They come from the asteroid Dimorphos and are currently racing towards Earth at around 5,400 kilometers per hour or more.
The meteorite cloud was triggered by the 610 kilogram NASA probe darts (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), which on September 26, 2022, after a ten-month flight, specifically hit the asteroid, which was then around eleven million kilometers away. The aim of the mission was to change the asteroid’s orbit, which it succeeded in doing. The project is part of a NASA strategy to protect Earth from an approaching asteroid. A catastrophe like 66 million years ago, when an asteroid impact presumably meant the end of the dinosaurs, should not happen again.
Dimorphos has a diameter of around 160 meters and orbits as a mini moon around the asteroid Didymos, which has a diameter of 780 meters. With the impact on Dimorphos could darts change its orbit in such a way that the orbital period around Didymos was shortened by 32 minutes to eleven hours and 23 minutes. This is the first time that humans have intentionally changed the movement of a celestial body – caused by the energy generated by it darts was released at an impact speed of approximately 22,000 kilometers per hour. The resulting ejection, many tons of asteroid rock, has since then been on its way towards Mars and Earth.
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:NASA actually pushes asteroids off course
The US space agency rammed “Dimorphos” with the small probe “Dart”. With success, as the measurements now show: it is now flying in a different orbit.
Esa sets this darts-Mission now with its own probe called Hera scheduled to depart Cape Canaveral, Florida on October 7th with a Falcon 9Space-X rocket is set to launch into space. The probe weighs a good ton and is scheduled to initially fly past Mars and its moon Deimos in March 2025, where it will also collect data for future Mars missions. Should be in October 2026 Hera then arrive at the Didymos-Dimorphos system. She will spend six months measuring both asteroids from different heights in order to determine the effects darts-Investigate the impact and take high-resolution images.
The probe will also carry the two mini-satellites Juventas and Milani release, which, among other things, will carry out radar and gravity measurements, take hyperspectral images of the surface, examine the mineral composition and then touch down on Dimorphos. The final highlight of the mission is a landing from Hera on Didymos. Data from the joint NASA and ESA missions will help develop technology to protect the Earth from asteroids.
From Esa’s perspective, the double asteroid is ideal for this mission and offers many firsts: Dimorphos is the smallest asteroid ever targeted by a probe, and a rapidly rotating asteroid like Didymos, which rotates in just 2.26 hours, has not yet had a visitor get from the earth.
Scientists were surprised that debris can also reach Earth
The HeraAccording to Esa, the mission costs 350 million euros and 19 countries are involved. The probe itself comes from Germany and was built by the Bremen company OHB. Cameras from Jena-Optronik and antennas from HPS are also installed.
According to Nasa, the two asteroids do not pose a threat to Earth. The researchers believe that millions of asteroid debris, ranging in size from thousandths of a millimeter to ten centimeters, could reach not only Mars but also Earth after the probe’s impact but probably surprised. Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez from the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC/IEEC) is one of the four authors of a Study on this topic. “We were amazed to discover that it is possible that some centimeter-sized particles could reach the Earth-Moon system and create a new meteor shower,” he is quoted as saying by Esa. Which meteorites are heading for Earth and which are heading for Mars depends on their size, speed and position in the planet darts caused cone-shaped impact cloud. The first debris is expected to arrive within seven to 13 years. But some take decades.
“The largest of these meteorites would only be the size of a softball. “They would definitely burn up in the earth’s atmosphere,” reassured the ESA. It also depends on the size whether a meteor shower can be seen from Earth. The researchers don’t know. “Larger particles have a slightly higher probability of reaching Mars, while smaller particles are more likely to reach the Earth-Moon region,” the study says.
Even if there is no threat of danger on Earth, it is conceivable that the particles could damage satellites or the ISS space station. Even micrometeorites can cause holes. According to Esa, the fact that the particles take at least seven years to reach Earth despite their high speed is due to the fact that the trajectory is curved by the sun’s gravity. “The trajectory that these debris would follow to reach Earth is not a straight line,” said Ignacio Tanco, head of ESA space operations. The debris would orbit the sun several times before reaching Earth.
“The Dart impact offers a rare opportunity to study the transport of ejecta to other celestial bodies,” says study co-author and ESA scientist Michael Küppers. According to ESA information, there are currently about 30,000 asteroidswhich reach near the earth, are in 1660 under special observation.
Other scientists are betting on atomic bombs
Nathan Moore, physicist at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is not convinced that the dart technique will also help with larger asteroids. He is one of a group of scientists who conducted an experiment in the laboratory to investigate what effects a nuclear explosion could have on an asteroid. Bruce Willis, who dismantled an asteroid with a nuclear bomb in the box office hit “Armageddon,” sends his regards.
Two replica asteroids made of quartz and silicon the size of coffee beans in a vacuum served as test subjects for the scientists. They bombarded the models with powerful X-rays and found that it is less the generated explosion pressure wave than the large amount of released X-rays that can change the trajectory of an asteroid. In the experiment, the surface of the mini-asteroids evaporated, which in turn caused a thrust that accelerated the models to a speed of around 250 kilometers per hour, according to the researchers in the journal Nature Physics report.
Moore now proposes testing this technique on larger asteroids up to about four kilometers in diameter. Other approaches, such as impacting a probe on an asteroid like the Dart mission, would probably “not generate enough energy to knock it off course.”