NASA’s Planetary Defense Test, DART, Reportedly Unleashed a Boulder Storm
A key lesson in unintended consequences that would-be #ClimateCrisis heroes may wish to be mindful of as they endeavor to save the planet from us humans.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that last September, I reported that NASA tested the “Double Asteroid Redirection Test” (DART) spacecraft successfully, as it intentionally slammed into an asteroid in an historic test of humanity’s ability to protect Earth from an impact event.
The data analyzed from the mission confirmed that the asteroid’s course has been altered. However, there are some unanticipated results that are now being shared.
Astronomers using Hubble’s extraordinary sensitivity have discovered a swarm of boulders that were possibly shaken off the asteroid when NASA deliberately slammed the half-ton DART impactor spacecraft into Dimorphos at approximately 14,000 miles per hour.
The 37 free-flung boulders range in size from three feet to 22 feet across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at little more than a half-mile per hour – roughly the walking speed of a giant tortoise. The total mass in these detected boulders is about 0.1% the mass of Dimorphos.
“This is a spectacular observation – much better than I expected. We see a cloud of boulders carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos by the impact,” said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, a planetary scientist who has been using Hubble to track changes in the asteroid during and after the DART impact.
“This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes. The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system.”
Boulder storm ‘as deadly as Hiroshima’ accidentally unleashed by NASA during test to change the trajectory of an asteroid
via https://t.co/SvLaQx6uqp https://t.co/RBm12zOP7S— Marc Hoare (@020644) August 9, 2023
Theoretically, the boulders could eventually be problematic for Earthers.
While the test was a success, it came with unintended consequences: ‘Smaller rocks flying off into space could create their own problems,’ the team shared in a press release.
Even a 15-foot boulder hitting Earth would deliver as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city during World World II.
…A new study led by UCLA astronomer David Jewitt said: ‘Because those big boulders basically share the speed of the targeted asteroid, they’re capable of doing their own damage.’
Jewitt said that given the high speed of a typical impact, a 15-foot boulder hitting Earth would deliver as much energy as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Dimorphos was never a threat to Earth but was chosen by NASA as the test target because it is six million miles from our planet.
This makes the moonlet close enough to be of interest but far enough not to have implications in case of the kind of unintended consequences UCLA found.
Well, let’s hope those boulders generated during that test don’t redirect here. At least, until the 2024 presidential candidates have been selected. Then the ticket comprised of the Sweet Meteor of Death/Supervolcano of Doom might get a mandate from the people.
Meanwhile, perhaps this is a key lesson in unintended consequences that would-be #ClimateCrisis ‘heroes’ may wish to be mindful of as they offer geoengineering solutions they would like to unleash on a global scale.
István Szapudi, an astronomer from the University of Hawaiʻi, argued his far-fetched concept was merely an enormous ‘solar shield’.
The shield – which would be made of the ultra strong ‘wonder material’ graphene – would block energy from the sun and cool down our planet.
The academic has outlined his madcap idea in a new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Much like being under an umbrella in hot weather, the space shield would cool down Earth, but without plunging us into the next ice age.
‘In Hawaiʻi, many use an umbrella to block the sunlight as they walk about during the day,’ Szapudi said.
‘I was thinking, could we do the same for Earth and thereby mitigate the impending catastrophe of climate change?’
What could possibly go wrong?
— ctsbillc (@ctsbillc) August 8, 2023
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Comments
I am more interested in directing large rocks towards specific landing zones.
Perhaps North Korea will do it for us.
So instead of 1 big object we now have a just slightly smaller object and a shotgun blast traveling around the solar system.
Those fools really want a ice age don’t they.
Back when this was all a great idea for no fewer than six Hollywood movies, physicists tried to explain that blowing up an approaching asteroid does precisely nothing to the projected path of the center of mass of the object as a whole, but instead of following the science, people were too busy following Elvis, Ron Popeil, Bernie Madoff, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps the parents of the very scientists who T-boned Dimorphos. Enjoy the decline, folks — at least it’ll make up for this year’s sucky Perseids.
I’m too lazy to look up specifics, but I remember news articles at the time mentioning that NASA did indeed measure a significant deflection in the flight path of the asteroid–better than they had hoped. I think the difference between the movies and this mission was that they were not attempting to blow up an asteroid but used a high-speed impact “sideways” against the asteroid. Conservation of momentum should lead to a change in direction.
Also, a hundred one-ton rocks is *far* less dangerous than 1 hundred-ton rock hitting the Earth. They’re entering the atmosphere at 11 km/sec, and friction will burn those bits to dust, particularly if the bits are fractured a little from the first impact.
00 Buckshot on steroids’
“we now have a just slightly smaller object and a shotgun blast traveling around the solar system.”
A configuration popularly known to gunnies as “buck & ball.” It was state-of-the-art ammo until the invention of rifled barrels around the time of the Civil War.
DART? Tethered Graphene solar shield?
My next question is…Dr Evil or Hugo Drax?
Can we get a pebble to hit wash,dc to drain the swamp?!
Revitalization of DC, clean sweep?
They could have saved a bundle and truly helped humanity by slamming it into Lizzo.
It would have bounced off.
Or disappeared without a trace.
Man plans. God laughs.
It took CHATbot exactly .o371ms to generate the name “Double Asteroid Redirection Test” (DART), saving taxpayers exactly 451.00 zuckerbucks.
So there’s that.
Typically anything smaller than 25m in diameter will burn up in our atmosphere, depending on density, and considering these rocks were dislodged from the surface they are likely not very dense (mostly rock, little metal).
As an example the Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to be about 59 feet in diameter. It did not reach the surface of Earth. It exploded over Chelyabinsk Oblast with the force of 26 to 33 Hiroshimas, but the damage to Chelyabinsk Oblast was minimal because the blast was high up in the atmosphere. A 15 foot boulder is not a concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
1,491 injuries and 7,200 buildings damaged is “not a concern”? It’s not a global disaster, but it’s a fairly big one.
OTOH, if that asteroid had been on a collision course with Earth, deflecting the major body so it missed would be a huge win, even though 37 boulders fell free and continued on the original course towards Earth. The main body could end civilization and kill off more species than has happened since the Dinosaur Killer impact, but over 99% of humanity, a similar percentage of animals, and our civilization would survive 37 Chelyabinsk, Hiroshima, or even Tunguska events. Since they would hit at random, 3/4 of the hits would be over large bodies of water, and most of the rest in sparsely populated rural regions – but even striking 37 major cities would leave most of the world economy and most of the world’s population untouched.
Hmm, let see… 6,000,000 miles away, traveling at 0.5 miles/hour…
Assuming some are actually heading toward us, we can expect their arrival around the year 3392. As someone who used to be well known once said, “What me worry?”
“Assuming some are actually heading toward us, we can expect their arrival around the year 3392. As someone who used to be well known once said, “What me worry?”
Yes, but ISTR NASA or the like removing a reference to the end of the solar system in about 5 billion years because they weren’t in the habit of scaring people…………………..
The rocks are diverging from Dimorphos at about 0.5 mph, but that is not how fast they are traveling. Dimorphos slowly orbits 65803 Didymos. 65803 Didymos is in an orbit around the sun a little longer, narrower, and slower than Mars’s orbit. So it’s average velocity is around 50,000 miles per hour. The rocks are traveling around the sun at the same speed, give or take a few mph.
They’ll cross Earth’s orbit twice in Didymos’s orbital period of 2.11 years. Usually Earth is nowhere near the crossing, but it was close in 2003, and will be close (5.86 million km) again at the next crossing in November 2023. So in about 3 months, those rocks will be flying by, only about 4 million miles away, and they’ll be coming near every few decades.
Dimorphos was a rubble pile. The notion of a surface is a rather loose concept with those. That the impact changed its orbit a lot more than expected tells us about how loosely packed the pile was. The boulders we can see are only the largest chunks visible by Hubble. There is a cloud of smaller diameter stuff that stretches out for over 10,000 km. We can see the cloud and not the individual pieces.
Both sample returns from asteroids, Osiris-REX from Bennu and Hayabusa 2 from Ryugu sampled rubble piles and kicked up a lot of debris during the sampling touch and go.
An appreciable percentage of the smaller bodies are thought to be rubble piles, though the actual numbers are mostly arm waving. As usual, the more find out, the more we find we don’t know. Cheers –
They can’t just “redirect”. Something would have to redirect them; and what could do that? They’re going in the same direction they were always going, which was not towards us. As the quoted article says, “Dimorphos was never a threat to Earth but was chosen by NASA as the test target because it is six million miles from our planet. This makes the moonlet close enough to be of interest but far enough not to have implications in case of the kind of unintended consequences UCLA found.”
We would be better off dealing with the effects of global warming if any than giving government the power that they claim to need to fight it. If we fight global warming we would give government control over every aspect of our lives. That would create a fascist tyranny like the USSR which would definitely be worse than global warming.
If Global Warming is proven science then the “scientific” advocates should be able to tell us what the temperatures are going to be in each month of the next 10 years their predictions should match the observed temperatures. If they can’t do this they should be fired and their grants canceled.