NASA Mission Threw One Million Kg Rock Into Space

According to scientists, there was enough material to fill six to seven rail cars.

On September 26, a NASA spacecraft successfully deflected the orbit of an asteroid from seven million miles away, clearing a historic test of humankind’s capacity to stop a celestial object from destroying life on Earth. Ten months after taking off from California on its ground-breaking mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor successfully hit its target, the space asteroid Dimorphos, at 7:14 pm Eastern Time (2314 GMT).

More than 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of rocks and dust from the asteroid have now been ejected into space, according to the space agency. According to scientists, there was enough material to fill six to seven rail cars.

“The team is using that data – as well as new information on the composition of the asteroid moonlet and the characteristics of the ejecta, gained from telescope observations and images from DART’s ride-along Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) contributed by the Italian Space Agency – to learn just how much DART’s initial hit moved the asteroid, and how much came from the recoil,” NASA said in a press release. 

The #DARTMission investigation team discussed early results from DART’s impact at #AGU22, revealing that the spacecraft altered Dimorphos’ orbit by ~33 mins & displaced over 2 millions lbs of rock into space – enough to fill 6 or 7 rail cars.

Learn more: https://t.co/7TPbZJjj84pic.twitter.com/p3wTQHROfJ

— NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) December 15, 2022

Neither Dimorphos nor the larger asteroid it circles, Didymos, are dangerous to Earth, the mission was great for target practice.

The space agency’s team determined that the momentum transferred when DART hit Dimorphos was roughly 3.6 times greater than if the asteroid had simply absorbed the spacecraft and produced no ejecta (the many tons of asteroidal rock displaced and launched into space by the impact) at all, indicating the ejecta contributed to moving the asteroid more than the spacecraft did. This is based on the assumption that Didymos and Dimorphos have the same densities.

DART, which was launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, was mostly piloted by NASA flight directors until the last hours of the trip, when autonomous on-board navigation software took over.

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