Post by Odysseus on Sept 9, 2023 18:55:20 GMT
Nearly a year ago, NASA successfully smashed an asteroid for the first time, in a landmark test to see whether we could divert a killer space rock before disaster — but now, the asteroid in question is behaving strangely.
As New Scientist reports, a schoolteacher and his pupils seem to have discovered that the orbit of Dimorphos, the space rock socked by the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last September, has apparently continued slowing down, unexpectedly, in the year since the refrigerator-sized craft smashed into it.
Jonathan Swift, a math and science teacher at the Thacher School in California, and his team of student astronomers have discovered that Dimorphos, which orbits around the larger near-Earth asteroid Didymos the way our Moon orbits the Earth, has been spinning consistently slower around Didymos than it did prior to the DART test. ...
As New Scientist reports, a schoolteacher and his pupils seem to have discovered that the orbit of Dimorphos, the space rock socked by the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last September, has apparently continued slowing down, unexpectedly, in the year since the refrigerator-sized craft smashed into it.
Jonathan Swift, a math and science teacher at the Thacher School in California, and his team of student astronomers have discovered that Dimorphos, which orbits around the larger near-Earth asteroid Didymos the way our Moon orbits the Earth, has been spinning consistently slower around Didymos than it did prior to the DART test. ...