NASA's DART spacecraft struck Dimorphos, the small companion of Didymos, on September 26, 2022. The impact shortened the moonlet's orbit around Didymos by roughly 33 minutes, demonstrating that a spacecraft could change an asteroid's motion. Measuring that local orbital change was the first result; detecting a change in the binary system's path around the Sun required a separate analysis.
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1:53blow it up, but to just gently nudge it out of the way gently because, you know, it's it's a giant asteroid. You got to get a little aggressive because it's a giant asteroid. But at the end of the day, all we have to do is gently nudge it out of the way and maybe it'll avoid Earth. Okay. And the first time that this happened was on September 26th, 2022. This was NASA's double asteroid redirection test. I was watching it live. This was the Dart mission. It collided with a moonlit of a two asteroid system. >> Okay. And I remember watching it live. You could literally see there was a there was a little satellite that acted like a projectile, like a missile, and
2:36it had a camera on it, and it was taking a photo of the moon as it was getting closer and closer and closer. And when it finally hit, the other satellite took photos of it. It hit this moon at 14,000 miles per hour, which is about 6 km/s. And the key result that we got immediately was that the orbit of this moonletit, the name was Dimorphice, orbiting around Ditimus. >> Mhm. >> The orbit of that moon around the main big asteroid had reduced by 33 minutes. >> Okay. So it went from something like 12 hours to 11 1/2 hours. >> So the contact changed the trajectory,
3:18the path that this two moonlit system was traveling on. >> Yeah. But so the contact changed the orbit of the two moonlit system orbit. >> That's what we could confirm. >> Okay. >> What you're saying is what this paper is about. >> I see. >> Okay. Which is >> I I I ran into the moon and now the orbit has changed. >> Yes. But what does that do for how this moon this this two asteroid system goes around Earth? >> Because the the orbit you're talking about is locally. >> Yes. Exactly. And and getting that signal is super easy. 30 minutes less than 12 hours. That's what some like a little bit less than like 5%. >> Right. That's a change that is is doable
3:59like pretty immediately especially cuz we've got the Dart mission in that asteroid system that's like monitoring the two going around, right? So, so, so getting that data is very quick. Happened in 2022. We got that confirmation like within I think like a month. Okay. >> Okay. This is now what 4 years later, 3 and a half years later. >> And now we have a paper that's out in science advances and it confirms that there's a meas measurable change in the
AstrophysicsOrbital MechanicsPlanetary DefensePrecision Measurement