Studies show how asteroid-bashing spacecraft was 'phenomenally successful'

WASHINGTON — NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a spot between two boulders during last September’s first test of a planetary…

“We were trying to change the amount of time that it took for Dimorphos to orbit around Didymos by colliding head-on with Dimorphos,” said Northern Arizona University planetary scientist Cristina Thomas, lead author of another of the studies published in Nature.

Prior to the impact, the orbital period was 11 hours and 55 minutes. It now is 11 hours and 22 minutes. NASA’s previous estimate, announced in October, was an orbital change of 32 minutes. The benchmark for success had been set as a change of at least 1 minute and 13 seconds.Article content“First, one of the spacecraft’s solar panels directly hit a large boulder near the impact site. Next, the second solar panel grazed another large boulder.

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