'Incredible': Astronomers hail first images of asteroid impact - RFI English

Issued on: 28/09/2022 - 11:50Modified: 28/09/2022 - 11:48

Paris (AFP) – The asteroid is flying through space in the grainy black and white video, when suddenly a massive cloud of debris sprays out in front of it, meaning only one thing: impact.

Astronomers have hailed this early footage of the first time humanity deliberately smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, saying it looks like it did a "lot of damage".

That would be good news, because NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor struck the asteroid Dimorphos at 23,500 kilometres (14,500 miles) per hour on Monday night with the goal of deflecting its trajectory.

While Dimorphos is 11 million kilometres (6.8 million miles) away and poses no threat to Earth, it is being used as a historic test run so the world can be ready to defend itself if a future astroid heads Earth's way.

After the impact, ground-based telescopes and the toaster-sized satellite LICIACube, which separated from DART a few weeks ago, revealed the first images of the collision.

"On the LICIACube images, the plume of what came off the surface was quite impressive," Antonella Barucci of the Paris Observatory's LESIA laboratory told AFP.

By examining the plume, "we can begin to estimate the density of the material on the surface," she said.

'Very, very big' plume

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project on Tuesday tweeted a nine-second video of the impact taken by its telescope in South Africa.

Larry Denneau, the ATLAS co-principal investigator, said the telescope took one image every 40 seconds.

#photo1

"So the whole sequence that you've seen on Twitter lasts about two hours in real time," he told AFP.

He said the "very, very big" plume was made by dust shooting off the asteroid.

"A lot of the dust is released at a speed that's greater than the gravity of the asteroid, and so it escapes," Denneau said.

The plume expanded to around "several thousand miles in diameter," he added.

In the coming days and weeks astronomers around the world will work to confirm whether the asteroid's trajectory was definitively altered by the impact.

Then the European Space Agency's Hera mission will arrive at Dimorphos in 2026 to survey the surface and discover the extent of DART's impact.

Hera mission principal investigator Patrick Michel said "we are all impressed by the magnitude of the event".

"We have done a lot of damage to Dimorphos," Michel said.

"We have a quantity of ejected matter that is quite incredible."

The amount of matter ripped from the asteroid will help scientists work out exactly how much its trajectory has been affected -- if at all.

"So it's a pretty good sign," he added.

juc-la-pcl-dl/yad

© 2022 AFP

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2022-09-28 09:50:19Z
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NASA explains decision to roll back Artemis I rocket - WAAY-TV 31 News

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2022-09-28 00:51:45Z
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NASA's Dart crashes into asteroid - KTVB

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2022-09-27 22:27:14Z
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Ready for its close-up: Vancouver Islanders snap spectacular photos of Jupiter - CHEK News

On a night when the solar system’s largest planet was the closest it’s been to Earth in nearly six decades, Vancouver Island’s astrophotographers were ready.

While you can glimpse it in the night sky for much of the year, Jupiter was glowing bright Monday as it not only was the closest it’s been since October 1963, but also was in opposition — a term to describe when a celestial object rises in the east as the sun sets in the west.

Greater Victoria photographer Conan Chee, who has snapped some impressive celestial phenomena like the Northern Lights and a meteor striking a “super blood wolf moon“, decided to try to capture his first-ever shot of the gas giant.

“My buddy was mentioning after his birthday, ‘you should go do it,’ because we saw some pictures on the internet,” said Chee. “I was like alright, I’ll give it a shot.”

After setting up his supertelephoto lens and dialing in his equipment over the course of two hours, and thanks to crystal clear, low-humiditiy conditions, Chee was left with an image clearly showing Jupiter’s orange body and dark red bands.

He also captured the planet’s four brightest moons: Callisto, Io, Ganymede and Europa.

Chee wasn’t the only person trying to score a once-in-a-lifetime shot of Jupiter.

#Jupiter topping my early Christmas tree. Hoping for a clear sky tomorrow night. #astronomy #yyj #planets pic.twitter.com/Zv9O6jc4kG

— Shannon (@Shancan1972) September 26, 2022

Members of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada — Victoria Chapter got their setups out as the planet came the closest it will to Earth until 2129.

Brock Johnston managed to snap not just Jupiter, but Saturn, over the past few nights as they glowed brighter in the night sky.

Johnston said he took the images from Brentwood bay  using a Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.

Jupiter is shown Sept. 26, 2022 from Brentwood Bay. (Brock Johnston)

Saturn is shown Sept. 26, 2022 from Brentwood Bay. (Brock Johnston)

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2022-09-28 00:33:45Z
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NASA's DART hits target asteroid in Earth defense test - The Star

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2022-09-27 09:00:00Z
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Jupiter at Opposition III | StarDate Online - Stardate.org

Earth and Jupiter wouldn’t appear to have a lot in common. Earth is a ball of rock surrounded by a thin atmosphere. Jupiter is a ball of gas 11 times wider than Earth, with a thick, dense atmosphere.

One thing they do have in common is thunderstorms. On both planets, rising columns of water vapor condense to form clouds when they reach higher, colder altitudes. If there’s enough water vapor and enough energy, the clouds can reach towering proportions — the kind that produce thunderstorms. On Earth, they can be 10 miles high. But on Jupiter, they can be dozens of miles tall.

Several missions to Jupiter have recorded lightning in its clouds. Some have recorded radio waves produced by the lightning. Others have actually seen lightning. Some of the lightning bolts are thousands of times stronger than anything on Earth.

The Juno mission has also seen smaller flashes above the clouds. And so far, scientists don’t have a great explanation for them. But they continue to work on the problem as Juno takes more readings of Jupiter’s big thunderstorms.

Jupiter’s great size and its clouds make it especially bright. And right now, it’s shining at its brightest. It looks like an especially brilliant star, outshined only by the Moon and Venus. Jupiter is low in the east at nightfall, climbs across the south during the night, and is ready to vanish in the west at dawn.
 

Script by Damond Benningfield

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2022-09-26 05:09:57Z
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Planetary defence test: Why NASA's aiming for an asteroid - CTV News

Ten months after launch, NASA's asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft neared a planned impact with its target on Monday in a test of the world's first planetary defence system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth.

The cube-shaped "impactor" vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos, about as large as a football stadium, and self-destruct around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.

The mission's finale will test the ability of a spacecraft to alter an asteroid's trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into the object at high speed to nudge it astray just enough to keep our planet out of harm's way.

It marks the world's first attempt to change the motion of an asteroid, or any celestial body.

DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, has made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA's flight directors, with control to be handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey.

Monday evening's planned impact is to be monitored in real time from the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

DART's celestial target is an asteroid "moonlet" about 560 feet (170 metres) in diameter that orbits a parent asteroid five times larger called Didymos as part of a binary pair with the same name, the Greek word for twin.

Neither object presents any actual threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test cannot create a new existential hazard by mistake.

Dimorphos and Didymos are both tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world's plant and animal species including the dinosaurs.

Smaller asteroids are far more common and pose a greater theoretical concern in the near term, making the Didymos pair suitable test subjects for their size, according to NASA scientists and planetary defence experts.

Also, their relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make them ideal for the first proof-of-concept mission of DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

ROBOTIC SUICIDE MISSION

The mission represents a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft must ultimately crash to succeed.

The plan is for DART to fly directly into Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph), bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track closer to its larger companion asteroid.

Cameras on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART days in advance are designed to record the collision and send images back to Earth.

DART's own camera is expected to return pictures at the rate of one image per second during its final approach, with those images streaming live on NASA TV starting an hour before impact, according to APL.

The DART team said it expects to shorten the orbital track of Dimorphos by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success, proving the exercise as a viable technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth - if one were ever discovered. A small nudge to an asteroid millions of miles away could be sufficient to safely reroute it away from the planet.

The test's outcome will not be known until a new round of ground-based telescope observations of the two asteroids in October. Earlier calculations of the starting location and orbital period of Dimorphos were confirmed during a six-day observation period in July.

DART is the latest of several NASA missions in recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system's formation more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Last year, NASA launched a probe on a voyage to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth with a sample collected in October 2020 from the asteroid Bennu.

The Dimorphos moonlet is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA. Although none are known to pose a foreseeable hazard to humankind, NASA estimates that many more asteroids remain undetected in the near-Earth vicinity.

NASA has put the entire cost of the DART project at US$330 million, well below that of many of the space agency's most ambitious science missions.

Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham

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2022-09-26 14:13:55Z
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