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Rocky debris blasted away from the tiny asteroid Dimorphos when NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into it in 2022 could create the first man-made meteor shower known as the Dimorphids, a study has found new.
The space agency planned the DART mission, or Double Asteroid Deflection Test, to conduct a full-scale assessment of asteroid deflection technology for planetary defense. NASA wanted to know if a kinetic impact – such as a spacecraft slamming into an asteroid at 13,645 miles per hour (6.1 kilometers per second) – would be enough to change the motion of a celestial object in space.
Neither Dimorphos nor the large parent space rock it orbits, known as Didymos, is a threat to Earth. Still, the binary asteroid system was a perfect target to test deflection technology because the size of Dimorphos is comparable to asteroids that could threaten our planet.
Astronomers used ground-based telescopes to monitor the aftermath of the impact for nearly two years, and determined that the DART spacecraft managed to change the way Dimorphos moves, shifting the moon’s asteroid orbital period – or how long which it takes to make one revolution around. Didymos – about 32 to 33 minutes.
But scientists also estimated that the collision intentionally generated more than 2 million pounds (almost 1 million kilograms) of rocks and dust—enough to fill about six or seven railroad cars. Exactly where in space all that material will be is still an open question.
Now, new research suggests that fragments of Dimorphos will arrive in the vicinity of Earth and Mars within decades to thirty years, with the possibility that some debris will reach the red planet within seven years. A small amount of debris could reach the Earth’s atmosphere within the next 10 years. The study has been accepted for publication by the Planetary Science Journal.
“This material could produce visible meteors (commonly known as shooting stars) as they enter the Martian atmosphere,” said lead study author Eloy Peña Asensio, a postdoctoral researcher for the Research group and Deep-space Astrodynamics Technology at the Italian Polytechnic University in Milan. “Once the first particles reach Mars or Earth, they could continue to arrive intermittently and periodically for at least the next 100 years, which is the length of our calculations.”
Predicting space debris
The individual pieces are small, from grains of sand to fragments the size of smartphones, so none of the debris poses a threat to Earth, Peña Asensio said.
“They would dissolve in the upper atmosphere through a process called ablation, due to friction with the air at hypervelocity,” he said. “There is no chance that Dimorphos material will reach the surface of the Earth.”
But it is more challenging to understand when the debris could reach the Earth and it depends on estimating the velocity of the fragments.
When the spaceship crashed into Dimorphos, he wasn’t alone. A small satellite called LCIACube separated from the spacecraft before the collision to capture footage of the collision and the debris cloud that followed.
“These vital data have enabled and are still being carried out in detail on the debris produced by the impact,” said Peña Asensio.
The research team used LCIACube data and the supercomputing facilities of the Consortium of University Services of Catalonia to simulate the trajectory of 3 million particles that created the impact. The computer modeling measured the possible paths and different velocities of the particles across the solar system as well as how the radiation emitted by the sun could affect the motion of the particles.
Previous research before the impact suggested that Dimorphos particles could reach Earth or Mars, Peña Asensio said, but for the new study, the team constrained the simulations to align with post-impact data from LCIACube.
The results of the study confirm that if the debris were ejected from Dimorphos at speeds of 1,118 miles per hour (500 meters per second), some fragments could reach Mars, while other, smaller and faster-moving debris 3,579 miles per hour (1,600 meters). per second) the ability to reach Earth.
The team said there are still uncertainties about the nature of the debris but concluded that the fastest moving particles could reach Earth in less than 10 years.
The authors of the study consider it unlikely that the Dimmorphids meteor shower will reach Earth, but they cannot rule it out, Peña Asensio said. And if it did happen, it would be a small meteor shower.
“The resulting meteor shower would be easily recognizable on Earth, as it would not coincide with any known meteor showers,” he said by email. “These meteors would be slow moving, with peak activity expected in May, and visible mainly from the southern hemisphere, apparently coming from near the Indus constellation.”
And while the researchers did not explore this possibility in their paper, their investigation suggested that the Dimorphos debris may have found its way onto other nearby asteroids.
Visit the aftermath
Debris from the impact was expected, but the possibility of material reaching Earth or Mars could only be calculated after the collision, said study co-author Michael Küppers, a planetary scientist at the European Space Astronomy Centre.
“Personally, at first I was surprised to see that, although the impact happened close to Earth (about 11 million kilometers away), it is easier for the impact ejecta (debris) to reach Mars than to reach Earth ,” Küppers said via email. “I believe the reason is that Didymos crosses the orbit of Mars, but remains just outside the orbit of Earth.”
Particles can be ejected from asteroids near the Earth, such as Phaethon, which is responsible for the Geminid Meteor shower that peaks in mid-December every year. Studying what was released by the DART impact could help predict when such material might reach Earth or Mars, said Patrick Michel, an astrophysicist and director of research at the National for Scientific Research in France. Michel was not involved in the study.
“This study attempts to quantify this possibility and confirms that it could happen, even if it relies on modeling that has its own uncertainties,” said Michel.
Future observations could help researchers refine measurements of the debris’ mass and determine how fast it is moving to calculate expected meteor activity, Peña Asensio said.
Hera’s mission will make those observations. The European Space Agency’s mission is expected to launch in October to observe the aftermath of the DART impact, reaching the asteroid system near the end of 2026. Together with a pair of CubeSats, the spacecraft will study the composition and mass of Dimorphos and a. transformed by the impact. Hera will also determine how much momentum was transferred from the spacecraft to the asteroid.
“Is there an impact crater, or was the impact so great that Dimorphos was globally reshaped?” said Küppers, who is also the project scientist for the Hera mission. “From ground-based data, we have some evidence for that data. Hera will tell us for sure. Also, we will see if the impact left Dimorphos (tumbling).”
Overall, the mission will enable astronomers to understand the dynamic evolution of debris “produced by impacts in a complex system of binary asteroids,” Michel said.
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