AVOIDING ARMAGEDDON

NASA DART MAKES DEEP IMPACT, SHOWING WE CAN DEFLECT ASTEROIDS AWAY FROM EARTH

- DAMIEN MARTIN

Without having to recruit a ragtag bunch of oil drillers led by Bruce Willis to save Earth from certain destruction, NASA seems to have found a way to alter the course of asteroids before they pose a threat like the one in “Armageddon.” The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) kinetic impactor conducted last fall on Dimorphos, a small asteroid with a diameter of about 580 feet, went much better than expected. NASA spent several months analyzing the data, and the Hubble telescope captured images of the impact.

“Smashing head on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour, the DART impactor blasted over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off of the asteroid,” NASA said in a statement.

That might not be worthy of a Michael Bay-directed blockbuster, but it’s still pretty cool.

MAJOR IMPACT 

Dimorphos is in a binary system with the larger asteroid Didymos, which Dimorphos orbits. NASA’s goal in slamming the DART kinetic impactor into Dimorphos was to alter the length of that orbit by 73 seconds. After analysis, scientists determined that Dimorphos now takes 11 hours, 22 minutes to orbit Didymos, meaning DART shortened it by 33 minutes. That’s more than 27 times better than they’d hoped.