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Post by End Zone on Sept 28, 2022 2:23:14 GMT -7
NASA successfully hit a small asteroid with a projectile named DART this past week. The b/w youtube video below shows the last few highspeed UHD frames of video just prior to projectile impact. The surface structure of the asteroid is similar to other asteroids imaged in the last decade. Much small debris is aggregated over millions of years creating a larger mass of rocky and icy space garbage held together by tiny microgravities. NASA thinks the projectile impact this past week will release enough energy into the asteroid to change the asteroid's track. NASA is using DART to test procedures that may save the earth from a much bigger rock sometime in the future. If you wonder how the NASA engineers calculated and modified the DART intercept track to ensure success, I can get into that at a later time. See also the link to Phys.org for more NASA and DART info. For now, enjoy the YouTube film. There is video music to add some drama. phys.org/news/2022-09-bam-nasa-spacecraft-asteroid-defense.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter |
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Post by End Zone on Sept 28, 2022 4:47:21 GMT -7
phys.org/news/2022-09-incredible-astronomers-hail-images-asteroid.htmlThe astronomer community is all over the asteroid impact and has posted 3 still images of the DART energy release. In deep space, the DART impact energy is released as heat and light as noted in the images. There is no pressure shockwave beyond the actual asteroid body which probably shook or shuddered very little due to the loosely packed rocky and icy debris performing like a huge shock absorber. Will the asteroid change course now? Does a butterfly flapping its wings in Thailand cause the weather to change in Arizona? Stay tuned. Click image to enlarge. 
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Post by FLCardinalFan on Sept 28, 2022 9:13:51 GMT -7
I just watched this.  Now if they can only move a hurricane |
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Post by End Zone on Sept 28, 2022 9:31:58 GMT -7
I just watched this. Now if they can only move a hurricane Those who believe in the DART and butterfly ideas, I'm guessing mostly the chaos theory gurus, will say yes, that turning bare butt cheeks toward the sea and letting out a large quantity of gas can affect global air circulation, and someday could cause a major hurricane to veer away from the US coast. Try it.  |
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Post by thomas cat on Sept 29, 2022 19:48:25 GMT -7
I was going to post something about this the day before the impact, but I got distracted with other things. I didn't know it at the time but quite by accident, I found there was going to be a live broadcast of this event on the Discovery Channel. I got to see it live....well if you don't count the 38 sec time delay that it takes the signal to get to Earth. The video you posted was exactly what you got to see during the live feed. That was pretty cool knowing it was live. That very last frame kind of surprised me. With the extreme micro gravity of something that size, it seemed tightly packed. I don't know how much a human would weigh if they were standing on it, but I bet it would be less than a pound if not than less than an ounce. Thanks for the photos you provided. It certainly looks like it kicked up quite a bit of debris and no doubt made a significant dent. If I understand this article correctly, we are going to get to see a much better view of the results in the coming weeks. This is taken from this article.... link"Fifteen days before impact, DART’s CubeSat companion Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), provided by the Italian Space Agency, deployed from the spacecraft to capture images of DART’s impact and of the asteroid’s resulting cloud of ejected matter. In tandem with the images returned by DRACO, LICIACube’s images are intended to provide a view of the collision’s effects to help researchers better characterize the effectiveness of kinetic impact in deflecting an asteroid. Because LICIACube doesn’t carry a large antenna, images will be downlinked to Earth one by one in the coming weeks."In the meantime,...here is a side-by-side image shortly after the impact from the Hubble and James Web telescope...  Either way, its looks like that tiny moon of that asteroid had a bad day. |
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Post by thomas cat on Oct 7, 2022 17:47:28 GMT -7
I keep looking for close up images of the impact that we are supposed to get at a later time. Nothing yet. However, I did come across some pictures/graphics that gives you a better perspective as to the size of everything. Dart shows at 19 meters but most of that is solar panels. Dimorphos is the tiny moon that Dart hit, and it orbits the asteroid Didymos.  I have to admit. When I first saw this picture, I thought it was only feet above the surface and those rocks were gravel size....I was wrong. They are car or even large truck size. I should have known better. At the speed Dart was traveling, it would not have time to take such a closeup and then transmit it back to earth.  This image shows you the true scale. Note the small human figure for scale.  And for further perspective....  |
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Post by End Zone on Oct 8, 2022 9:32:19 GMT -7
TC, nice work on the optics and physics. I now have a much better appreciation for mass, energy, and geometry. Tiny Dimorphos is a common rock and ice pile (moon) orbiting a larger rock and ice pile (asteroid). I assumed that tiny Dimorphos would gently merge with larger Didymos--maybe a hookup happened in a thousand or million Earth years? Because of DART, a Dimorphos/Didymos merger is probably not going to happen. Oh well, space stuff happens.
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