Tag Archives: Asteroid Defense

Potential Earth-Shattering Kabooms

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These are the obits of the roughly 1000 known potentially hazardous asteroids. These are the known Near Earth Objects that are 140 m or more across that are expected pass with 7.5 million km of Earth within the next 100 years. None of them are expected to hit the Earth during the next century, but not all the dangerous asteroids have been discovered yet.

Image Credit: NASA

When DART Met Dimorphos

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In this first image, the footprint of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft and its two long solar panels has been overlaid with where it hit asteroid Dimorphos. The largest boulder near the impact site is about 6.5 meters across. DART took the image three seconds before impact.

When DART struck Dimorphos, the spacecraft body hit between two large boulders, and its two solar panels hit the boulders. The yellow surface in the sconce image is a digital terrain model of the impact site made from DART images, and the model of the spacecraft shows its orientation a few tens of microseconds before impact. The white line extending from the back of the spacecraft is its trajectory. The spacecraft’s body was about 1.3 m from front to back.
Credits: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL