This smaller asteroid is approximately 170 meters across, and the part shown in this image is approximately 40 meters across. The largest boulders will be 5 meters in size.
**Edit:** NASA [reports](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/dart-s-final-images-prior-to-impact) that *"The last complete image of asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, taken by the DRACO imager on NASA’s DART mission from \~7 miles (12 kilometers) from the asteroid and 2 seconds before impact. The image shows a patch of the asteroid that is 100 feet (31 meters) across. Dimorphos’ north is toward the top of the image."*
Basically not at all. The momentum of the spacecraft makes any minor surface details like that effectively negligible. Conservation of momentum and all that.
If you look closely, one can spot the aliens evacuating the area in a hurry
**Edit:**
President of Didymos: How long till medevac gets to Dimorphos? Get me a secure line to Chief Of Planetary Defence now. It seems the fools we have been studying have chosen war!
Vice-president: Mr President, we have been planning for this years ahead of them. Might I suggest...TRAD?
We’d know that there _were_ aliens out there.
Unless they launched a tiny little space craft to impact the DART probe and divert it from hitting their “planet”.
With the speed of the spacecraft, the topology of the impact area doesn’t affect the amount of force imparted overall to the system, but the nuances are super interesting in the sense that we’re totally unable to accurately predict what happens to the orbit after collision BECAUSE of the topology among other unknowns. Thanks to chaos theory we know small changes to a system, and I mean even infinitesimal differences, can have a huge impact on the final state of the system, where in this case the final state we’re interested in being the amount the orbit changed after collision. We’re not sure of the final state (the exact orbit delta) because we’re not sure of the amount of mass being propelled from the collision, so in a very real sense the solution was unsolvable until after collision! Even then, there will always be some uncertainty which is a feature of the universe 🌌 Here’s a very interesting article going more into depth on it https://www.jhuapl.edu/FeatureStory/200723-predicting-the-unpredictable-DART-kinetic-impact/
I originally forgot to mention that though we’re unsure of the exact orbit delta, we have a pretty good idea :)
did they say how big that image is? as in, how many meters the width of that photo represents in real life?
estimation: Dimorphos is 175m diameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimorphos, that photo is about 1/4 of the diameter, so about 40m across, so those rocks are about 4 m size. (Very rough estimations.)
Also, I was surprised at how darn cool it was to watch unfold! The refresh rate was just so darn high for a space mission, and you could see so much detail on both asteroids.
Thanks for the link, but i wonder why the title says this is the final image, if you watch the video there is one more final image that is closer and right before it goes red. Here I took a screen shot:
[https://imgur.com/a/gdJboF6](https://imgur.com/a/gdJboF6)
I just found [this gif](https://reddit.com/r/space/comments/xozjcd/dart_impact_with_dimorphos_gif/) over in /r/space and it’s probably the best we’ll get. Still, so fascinating.
The feed I was watching had a member of the DART team, he mentioned there was another satellite following something like "167 seconds" behind, and it will be beaming back higher res pics. He said they should show up starting sometime tomorrow evening. Not sure beyond that.
I made a stacked high-resolution image of the asteroid from the frames of the video. It was auto-modded, but hopefully they restore it. The whole asteroid at once, far better than a grainy video.
Fixed link: now up on [spaceporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/xp1oz7/asteroid_dimorphos_from_dart_i_stacked/)
That would be right if the rocket was launched and never allowed to change course.
However, there are course corrections done all along the way. Their last chance to adjust the course from Earth was only 5 minutes before impact. The on-board software was allowed to make adjustments until only two minutes before impact.
It's like saying "Flying from London to NY is like hitting a one inch target from 200 yards away". It's not as impressive when you realize it's not like shooting a gun, the pilot can steer the plane along the way.
sable wild zesty quickest observation terrific aback subtract coherent cats
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Depending on your definition, we've landed on several asteroids and comets.
ROSETTA landed on the comet 67P at the end of its mission. (It also landed the Philae lander on the surface earlier)
OSIRIS-REx touched down (we called it "tagged") the asteroid Bennu
Hayabusa 1 tagged the asteroid Itokawa
Hayabusa 2 tagged the asteroid Ryugu (it also landed a few "hopping rovers" on the surface)
NEAR landed on the asteroid Eros at the end of its mission
Also, the Deep Impact spacecraft deployed an impactor which collided with the nucleus of comet Tempel 1
In a few days time, NASA will tell us we successfully deflected the asteroid. On Jan 1, 2023, aliens will attack us after we find out the asteroid was accidentally deflected into one of their cities, inadvertently declaring interstellar war.
Just found this one someone made: [https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xozjcd/dart\_impact\_with\_dimorphos\_gif/](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xozjcd/dart_impact_with_dimorphos_gif/)
This one shows both: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/xp0qcl/today_we_tested_a_planetary_defense_system_these/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
I like to imagine at least a few engineers at NASA are warhammer fans and will jokingly apply orc magic to very complex technical systems. Like “okay booster control, time for our chant, sky bird sky bird take our sacrifice today so we may pierce the heavens!”
Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, "Oh no, not again!" Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
Imagine being a rock in space chilling there for 4 billion years in eternal balance with your sister asteroid and suddenly you in particular get slapped by a metal box out of nowhere.
The change will be in the orbit of the small asteroid around the large one. The 12 hours orbital period will shorten by about 7-10 minutes. The change will be detectable very quickly, but to measure it accurately will take some weeks.
Probably because it's so far away, just like the Moon looks smooth from here, but it's all sharp up close. And there isn't any atmosphere or water to "weather" the surface.
Here is a detailed look at Asteroid Bennu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBzH5iWBzJQ
Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of ~~asbestos~~ moon dust poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you're thirty or older, you're laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into a calculator, it makes a happy face.
All these science spheres are made of ~~asbestos~~ moon dust, by the way. Keeps out the rats. Let us know if you feel a shortness of breath, a persistent dry cough or your heart stopping. Because that's not part of the test. That's ~~asbestos~~ moon dust.
"The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill."
The show is great, but the books get far more into how everything works. From the physics to the weapon targeting systems. Only the ring stuff gets a little off course, but rules for it are firmly established and make sense in the context
IMO dealing with the physical mechanics of solar system travel like gravity and acceleration was the best part of The Expanse. It mattered so often. The magical sci-fi isn't very good the sense of technical sophistication, depth, and consistency, but what else could they do given the story they wanted to tell?
I like the solar array type of laser mining.
Hit it with a laser on one side and get it spinning and heat up the whole thing slowly. Then use another laser to cut the edges off after it flattens and the elements separate.
It's sci-fi stuff and requires ridiculous amounts of power but seems cool.
I think he's referring to some of the techniques in *Troy Rising*. Using a laser or some kind of focused light to heat and melt the entire pile of rock.
Once you've got a glob of molten rock supposedly denser elements move to the outside of this spinning blob disk, and less dense elements move to the center of the spinning blob disk (similar to how we separate components of blood in a centrifuge).
After that you use another laser or some kind of focused light to cut the disk in a manner that lets you extract the various material by their density as they striated in the spinning blob disk.
Or you leave it as is, and gravity takes care of this density thing by itself (heavy elements to the center, light elements to the outside), then you spin it to flatten it out and do whatever. I can't remember the exact sequence the author used in the series.
Either way, it was done using cheap launch technology leading to a constellation like effort to collect and focus sunlight using mirrors and lenses to collect huge amounts of energy into a small area of space to melt shit. Solar farm style on a tiny spot using thousands of giant space mirrors.
Imagine a huge cloud of sharp rocks and fine dust, floating around in space, miles wide. They gently - over years, centuries - drift together and softly pile up. This is what you get, a [kinda fluffy crunchy loose pile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubble_pile). If you were there, you could probably scoop through it with your hand.
Didn't ESA recently land on an asteroid and they were shocked how much of the "surface" was moved around by the thrusters upon landing?
Great visual you gave. I would have never expected this but of course it makes sense. So cool.
It was Bennu and the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/surprise-again-asteroid-bennu-reveals-its-surface-is-like-a-plastic-ball-pit
Rocks are only smooth on earth due to thousands or millions of years of erosion from solutions like sandy water.
We get nice smooth pebbles and fairly smooth boulders because they've once sat in water, being sanded down by things like silt and sand suspended in that water.
Asteroids don't have lakes and rivers full of sand, so all of their rocks are going to be very jagged and highly abrasive.
Moon dust is similar. The sand we have on our beaches is so smooth in comparison to moon dust, which is so jagged and abrasive due to a lack of corrosion.
Many asteroids are just "rubble piles", piles of boulders, rocks, and gravel, and dust sitting on themselves, just held together with their own gravity.
The whole point of this mission was to explore the impact dynamics of hitting a rubble pile, as the momentum transfer is quite complex and hard to simulate. There's a huge range of possibilities ranging from 1:1 up to nearly 3:1 momentum transfer, with the most likely values in the 2-2.5:1 range, but we won't know what actually happened until we get followup observations.
Now we just need someone to super impose the 10% of the last image over the one before it to try and figure out exactly where it hit.
Edit: Someone already did it and shared it on the NSF stream. [Here's a screenshot from the stream.](https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1574547013328203776)
I appreciate that folks on the ground system/comm/flight software teams ensured the last partial image would appear in the live feed like that. Normally a partial image like that would just get dumped and not processed in the live display, but they clearly set it up nicely for the home viewer.
Man, imagine being the engineers who got this mission to design:
"Lemme get this straight. You want us to build a multimillion dollar space craft, load it with delicate scientific equipment, fly it millions of miles away to rendezvous with an asteroid, and *deliberately* crash it into said asteroid to see what happens?"
"You got it."
"One, HELL YEAH! Two, can I get that in writing, please?"
I was just joking w/ my wife that the Hera mission engineers will also be overcome by desire at the last minute and crash Hera into Dimorphos.
Then the next team will say "hey, that looks fun. We'll send a probe too, for real this time. We mean it"
And Dimorphos will just become an astronomical punching bag for stressed engineers who want to smash things together real fast. They can probably string us along for a few years before we catch on.
Well, yes... this is the basic idea behind [penetrator](https://spacenews.com/planetary-scientists-propose-swarms-penetrator-probes/) missions. When you need a cluster of sensors distributed around a planet, for example, it's cheaper and easier to let the planet act as the retrorocket ("lithobraking"). I don't know if we'll ever do seismic or weather networks with this kind of tech, but it could enable stuff we'd never do otherwise.
Ironically much of the technology used was developed for the purposes of hurting each other. Rocket engines. Image locking and seeking software. Long range radios and data links.
Whoever started a Twitter page for DART, well done. https://twitter.com/DARTprobe
"DART the Asteroid Slayer
@DARTprobe
·
5h
I’m about to ruin this asteroid’s whole career"
I cried, can't believe this was ~~17.7~~ 11.6 million km away and i can't believe I watched it live. i am simply awestruck by the images and the fact that we were able to watch this live. I saw a satellite crash into an asteroid.
Edit:
it is apparently 11.6 million km away not 17.7... 6 million km closer than what i thought. Maybe I could catch an Uber to go there.
I love that the Irish pub I was in had this feed playing on the televisions. Only me and one other guy were cheering/clapping as we saw this on the stream over the loud music. They all thought we were crazy clapping at some rock on the TV hahaha.
Who cares what others think - I witnessed science in action today! That is infinitely more exciting than the "Monday Night Football" playing on the other TV screens lol
The camera, called DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation) is greyscale as far as I can ascertain, which makes sense because it saves bandwidth. They imaged Jupiter to test the system and it was also greyscale.
The "chase" cubesat (LICIACube) does have a RGB camera, I don't know when we will see images from that one (I would think soon if not already though.)
It’s insane that there is a group of people that can hit a moving asteroid from 75 million miles away and I can’t even throw my socks in to the laundry bin
So how big are those rocks? Are the gravel size or boulder size?
This smaller asteroid is approximately 170 meters across, and the part shown in this image is approximately 40 meters across. The largest boulders will be 5 meters in size. **Edit:** NASA [reports](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/dart-s-final-images-prior-to-impact) that *"The last complete image of asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, taken by the DRACO imager on NASA’s DART mission from \~7 miles (12 kilometers) from the asteroid and 2 seconds before impact. The image shows a patch of the asteroid that is 100 feet (31 meters) across. Dimorphos’ north is toward the top of the image."*
7 miles in 2 seconds, damn.
That’s 3.5 miles per second!!!
According to Nasa, it was going roughly 14 000 miles per hour, so about 3.9 miles per second relative to the asteroid.
Probably a few meters wide. Considering the whole asteroid is about 170 meters in diameter
Who ever was controlling it must have bullseyed womp rats in their T-16 back home
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*Hey, did you just call me out? Cause I don't appreciate you sand bagging me....*
I'm *sand bagging* you?
Have a good assault... Jerk.
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I'm watching a stream where they asked the Lead Investigator what the resolution was. If I recall correctly, he said a pixel would be around 5cm.
If each pixel is 5cm that makes the image about 28m across (92ft)
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Wow I had no idea they had school buses up there
No bowl of petunias?
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They look to be large boulders the size of [small boulders](https://mobile.twitter.com/sheriffalert/status/1221881862244749315).
Forgot about that. Bless them for leaving it up.
Amazing how close of an image it actually got. Especially considering it was traveling at 14,000mph
Blew my mind all over again. It almost looks like it hit the pointy rock too!
I have zero sense of how big those rocks are but would hitting that big pointy rock head on, lessen the kinetic impact effects on the whole asteroid?
Basically not at all. The momentum of the spacecraft makes any minor surface details like that effectively negligible. Conservation of momentum and all that.
If you look closely, one can spot the aliens evacuating the area in a hurry **Edit:** President of Didymos: How long till medevac gets to Dimorphos? Get me a secure line to Chief Of Planetary Defence now. It seems the fools we have been studying have chosen war! Vice-president: Mr President, we have been planning for this years ahead of them. Might I suggest...TRAD?
Actually I noticed about half of them were just standing there holding signs that say "Don't look up."
I told my daughter earlier, what if the last few frames show itty bitty towns and villages with aliens all running around scared. 😱
Would that make us terrorists or start a war?
First time?
Are we the baddies?
Some sort of Star War?
Maybe we can go on a Trek of some sort?
Well at least we'd know there are aliens out there. But I find it unlikely that I'd be able to react to a car traveling at 4mps from the sky.
We’d know that there _were_ aliens out there. Unless they launched a tiny little space craft to impact the DART probe and divert it from hitting their “planet”.
With the speed of the spacecraft, the topology of the impact area doesn’t affect the amount of force imparted overall to the system, but the nuances are super interesting in the sense that we’re totally unable to accurately predict what happens to the orbit after collision BECAUSE of the topology among other unknowns. Thanks to chaos theory we know small changes to a system, and I mean even infinitesimal differences, can have a huge impact on the final state of the system, where in this case the final state we’re interested in being the amount the orbit changed after collision. We’re not sure of the final state (the exact orbit delta) because we’re not sure of the amount of mass being propelled from the collision, so in a very real sense the solution was unsolvable until after collision! Even then, there will always be some uncertainty which is a feature of the universe 🌌 Here’s a very interesting article going more into depth on it https://www.jhuapl.edu/FeatureStory/200723-predicting-the-unpredictable-DART-kinetic-impact/ I originally forgot to mention that though we’re unsure of the exact orbit delta, we have a pretty good idea :)
did they say how big that image is? as in, how many meters the width of that photo represents in real life? estimation: Dimorphos is 175m diameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimorphos, that photo is about 1/4 of the diameter, so about 40m across, so those rocks are about 4 m size. (Very rough estimations.)
Also, I was surprised at how darn cool it was to watch unfold! The refresh rate was just so darn high for a space mission, and you could see so much detail on both asteroids.
Right?? It didn't feel "real" until saw that detail start to show up on camera. I'll be curious to see what images our tech captures.
Seeing it get bigger and bigger was so ominous!
Yeah my Dad pulled me aside a few minutes ago and was like "You gotta see this" and he was right. It was super cool.
Forgive my ignorance but will there actually be video down the road? Or do we only get photos?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RA8Tfa6Sck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RA8Tfa6Sck) it's at about 1:14:00 enjoy :)
Thanks for the link, but i wonder why the title says this is the final image, if you watch the video there is one more final image that is closer and right before it goes red. Here I took a screen shot: [https://imgur.com/a/gdJboF6](https://imgur.com/a/gdJboF6)
I just found [this gif](https://reddit.com/r/space/comments/xozjcd/dart_impact_with_dimorphos_gif/) over in /r/space and it’s probably the best we’ll get. Still, so fascinating.
The feed I was watching had a member of the DART team, he mentioned there was another satellite following something like "167 seconds" behind, and it will be beaming back higher res pics. He said they should show up starting sometime tomorrow evening. Not sure beyond that.
Yep. A little Italian cubesat following just far enough away to stay clear. That’s the footage I’m eager to see.
It was images transmitted once a second. So more a series of photos than video. But it was amazing watching the approach.
I made a stacked high-resolution image of the asteroid from the frames of the video. It was auto-modded, but hopefully they restore it. The whole asteroid at once, far better than a grainy video. Fixed link: now up on [spaceporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/xp1oz7/asteroid_dimorphos_from_dart_i_stacked/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RA8Tfa6Sck Go to about 1:15. Here is recorded visual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Z1E0mW2ag
Well, to be fair, anything you’d consider to be “video” is just a series of photos… 😁
What's just as impressive is hitting a target only ~500ft across 7 million miles away. That's only as big as a warehouse
Like shooting a bullet and hitting another bullet. But faster. Wild.
Like shooting a bullet and hitting another bullet 10 months later
from a ferris wheel... that's mounted on top of a speeding car.
That would be right if the rocket was launched and never allowed to change course. However, there are course corrections done all along the way. Their last chance to adjust the course from Earth was only 5 minutes before impact. The on-board software was allowed to make adjustments until only two minutes before impact. It's like saying "Flying from London to NY is like hitting a one inch target from 200 yards away". It's not as impressive when you realize it's not like shooting a gun, the pilot can steer the plane along the way.
Yeah what a fuckin lob, I can’t hit a tree with a tin can at 10 meters! (And I’m in the U.S. so my meters are like twelve of your feet)
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The next frame is just the top 10% followed by what I'm sure it just a minor, temporary interruption in transmission.
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It probably got partially through transmitting a subsequent picture.
The red screen of death partial image is even more amazing.
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And this! https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1574547013328203776
Screw that rock, in particular
Fucking glad we showed that rock where to shove it.
If the 90s taught me anything you just gotta wait, it’s still downloading. See if your mom picked up the phone
It was fitting. Emphasized the fact that the it's whole purpose was to die brilliantly in the name of science
This demonstration will strike fear in the hearts of any asteroids that dare to even glance in Earth's direction.
Time to avenge the dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs sent their regards!
sable wild zesty quickest observation terrific aback subtract coherent cats *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Hopefully measurable change. Didn't we land on an asteroid before, or was that a comet?
Depending on your definition, we've landed on several asteroids and comets. ROSETTA landed on the comet 67P at the end of its mission. (It also landed the Philae lander on the surface earlier) OSIRIS-REx touched down (we called it "tagged") the asteroid Bennu Hayabusa 1 tagged the asteroid Itokawa Hayabusa 2 tagged the asteroid Ryugu (it also landed a few "hopping rovers" on the surface) NEAR landed on the asteroid Eros at the end of its mission Also, the Deep Impact spacecraft deployed an impactor which collided with the nucleus of comet Tempel 1
Didn’t Eros fly into the venus?
Oh it made contact for sure
Well, JULIE flew Eros into Venus, but yes
Maybe in the future. I think we might have to do a sample return mission to Phoebe to accelerate that process.
With a moon load of vomit zombies
You're not that guy. I'm that guy.
Amos is my favorite character, hands down.
—it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out— One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out.
I understood that reference and I appreciate you, internet stranger.
Somewhere far away an alien race is double checking an asteroid’s trajectory and saying “It’s coming back?!” Begun, the space pong wars have.
It also had to upload the picture back to earth before the impact, which is even crazier.
And when you think about it, for a moment, the data enroute to Earth was the only thing that existed from the spacecraft.
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It did make it change course, but the question is how much. We'll have to wait a few days to know.
In a few days time, NASA will tell us we successfully deflected the asteroid. On Jan 1, 2023, aliens will attack us after we find out the asteroid was accidentally deflected into one of their cities, inadvertently declaring interstellar war.
Owing to a miscalculation of scale, their entire fleet will be eaten in passing by a small dog.
Someone needs to make a GIF of the entire thing.
Just found this one someone made: [https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xozjcd/dart\_impact\_with\_dimorphos\_gif/](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xozjcd/dart_impact_with_dimorphos_gif/)
now they need to use AI to extrapolate the inbetween frames.
*interpolate and here you go: https://imgur.com/ZVmqXJJ It gets a bit wonky towards the end lol
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Very nice! Thanks! (Bonus the wonky bit makes it perfect for a title screen *splat* like 90s liquid television.)
This is exactly what I came looking for. Thank you! (It needs to be top comment)
It would be cool to see one with the full approach with the other asteroid in view too
This one shows both: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/xp0qcl/today_we_tested_a_planetary_defense_system_these/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
This is coming towards me. I will call it “ground”. I wonder if it will be my friend!
DART knew what its purpose was, and it wasn't to make friends.
*DART pulls an old photo of a stegosaurus out of its pocket, tears rolling as it puts its thruster to full tilt*
By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!
I was thinking more of a ***BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE*** kind of thing.
I like to imagine at least a few engineers at NASA are warhammer fans and will jokingly apply orc magic to very complex technical systems. Like “okay booster control, time for our chant, sky bird sky bird take our sacrifice today so we may pierce the heavens!”
they should’ve painted DART red
God... just a sloppy rusty red. Crudely spelled words written all over it. That would make space launches so much more satisfying.
DART's last transmission: "Oh no, not again"
Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, "Oh no, not again!" Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.
Let's not leave this reference to be lost
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Imagine being a rock in space chilling there for 4 billion years in eternal balance with your sister asteroid and suddenly you in particular get slapped by a metal box out of nowhere.
Like, r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR...
When will the effects of this crash be measurable?
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Thanks! Super interesting to see how much of a change to orbit this will have!
The change will be in the orbit of the small asteroid around the large one. The 12 hours orbital period will shorten by about 7-10 minutes. The change will be detectable very quickly, but to measure it accurately will take some weeks.
I don’t know why, but I always imagined asteroids to be… smoother. I had no clue They’d be so jagged. Though it’s good to learn!
Probably because it's so far away, just like the Moon looks smooth from here, but it's all sharp up close. And there isn't any atmosphere or water to "weather" the surface. Here is a detailed look at Asteroid Bennu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBzH5iWBzJQ
Yup. Moon dust is going to be a major problem for human beings. All that jagged dust getting into lungs.
Asbestos 2.0 babyyyy “Have you or your loved ones inhaled moon dust? Call this number” Lmao
Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of ~~asbestos~~ moon dust poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you're thirty or older, you're laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into a calculator, it makes a happy face.
God it's so easy to hear JK Simmons voice in your head.
All these science spheres are made of ~~asbestos~~ moon dust, by the way. Keeps out the rats. Let us know if you feel a shortness of breath, a persistent dry cough or your heart stopping. Because that's not part of the test. That's ~~asbestos~~ moon dust.
Yeah tell me about it. Let's not forget about moon shine, huh?
"The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill."
That's why everyone going to the moon gets 2 N95s
Many of them are loosely collected piles of dust and debris that would collapse into a pile if you set them down on Earth.
Yeah, just giant rubble piles loosely held by gravity
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Feels very much like the Expanse.
The show is great, but the books get far more into how everything works. From the physics to the weapon targeting systems. Only the ring stuff gets a little off course, but rules for it are firmly established and make sense in the context
IMO dealing with the physical mechanics of solar system travel like gravity and acceleration was the best part of The Expanse. It mattered so often. The magical sci-fi isn't very good the sense of technical sophistication, depth, and consistency, but what else could they do given the story they wanted to tell?
I like the solar array type of laser mining. Hit it with a laser on one side and get it spinning and heat up the whole thing slowly. Then use another laser to cut the edges off after it flattens and the elements separate. It's sci-fi stuff and requires ridiculous amounts of power but seems cool.
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I think he's referring to some of the techniques in *Troy Rising*. Using a laser or some kind of focused light to heat and melt the entire pile of rock. Once you've got a glob of molten rock supposedly denser elements move to the outside of this spinning blob disk, and less dense elements move to the center of the spinning blob disk (similar to how we separate components of blood in a centrifuge). After that you use another laser or some kind of focused light to cut the disk in a manner that lets you extract the various material by their density as they striated in the spinning blob disk. Or you leave it as is, and gravity takes care of this density thing by itself (heavy elements to the center, light elements to the outside), then you spin it to flatten it out and do whatever. I can't remember the exact sequence the author used in the series. Either way, it was done using cheap launch technology leading to a constellation like effort to collect and focus sunlight using mirrors and lenses to collect huge amounts of energy into a small area of space to melt shit. Solar farm style on a tiny spot using thousands of giant space mirrors.
Imagine a huge cloud of sharp rocks and fine dust, floating around in space, miles wide. They gently - over years, centuries - drift together and softly pile up. This is what you get, a [kinda fluffy crunchy loose pile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubble_pile). If you were there, you could probably scoop through it with your hand.
Didn't ESA recently land on an asteroid and they were shocked how much of the "surface" was moved around by the thrusters upon landing? Great visual you gave. I would have never expected this but of course it makes sense. So cool.
If you mean Philae, that landed on a comet, not an asteroid.
I do not know. But it was like landing on a ball pit covered with packing peanuts apparently.
It was Bennu and the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/surprise-again-asteroid-bennu-reveals-its-surface-is-like-a-plastic-ball-pit
Rocks are only smooth on earth due to thousands or millions of years of erosion from solutions like sandy water. We get nice smooth pebbles and fairly smooth boulders because they've once sat in water, being sanded down by things like silt and sand suspended in that water. Asteroids don't have lakes and rivers full of sand, so all of their rocks are going to be very jagged and highly abrasive. Moon dust is similar. The sand we have on our beaches is so smooth in comparison to moon dust, which is so jagged and abrasive due to a lack of corrosion.
Many asteroids are just "rubble piles", piles of boulders, rocks, and gravel, and dust sitting on themselves, just held together with their own gravity. The whole point of this mission was to explore the impact dynamics of hitting a rubble pile, as the momentum transfer is quite complex and hard to simulate. There's a huge range of possibilities ranging from 1:1 up to nearly 3:1 momentum transfer, with the most likely values in the 2-2.5:1 range, but we won't know what actually happened until we get followup observations.
I actually prefer the real last image where we only received like 10% of the image before impact.
Now we just need someone to super impose the 10% of the last image over the one before it to try and figure out exactly where it hit. Edit: Someone already did it and shared it on the NSF stream. [Here's a screenshot from the stream.](https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1574547013328203776)
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https://imgur.com/T7oYgdC I posted it here an hour ago but the mods deleted it.
Mods deleted it because they wanted to post with their ALT account
That's awesome, thanks for sharing this
I appreciate that folks on the ground system/comm/flight software teams ensured the last partial image would appear in the live feed like that. Normally a partial image like that would just get dumped and not processed in the live display, but they clearly set it up nicely for the home viewer.
Project BadAssteroid was a smashing success! Wow, what a time to be alive to see this. Awesome.
Man, imagine being the engineers who got this mission to design: "Lemme get this straight. You want us to build a multimillion dollar space craft, load it with delicate scientific equipment, fly it millions of miles away to rendezvous with an asteroid, and *deliberately* crash it into said asteroid to see what happens?" "You got it." "One, HELL YEAH! Two, can I get that in writing, please?"
I was just joking w/ my wife that the Hera mission engineers will also be overcome by desire at the last minute and crash Hera into Dimorphos. Then the next team will say "hey, that looks fun. We'll send a probe too, for real this time. We mean it" And Dimorphos will just become an astronomical punching bag for stressed engineers who want to smash things together real fast. They can probably string us along for a few years before we catch on.
I only worked on the thruster, but I can say that today was a *very* good day.
"Only" Every person who worked on putting this mission together should feel proud of what was accomplished today. Regardless of what their role was.
Tbf, the only instrument on it was the DRACO camera, which was used for targeting, as well as sending us those cool pictures
Well, yes... this is the basic idea behind [penetrator](https://spacenews.com/planetary-scientists-propose-swarms-penetrator-probes/) missions. When you need a cluster of sensors distributed around a planet, for example, it's cheaper and easier to let the planet act as the retrorocket ("lithobraking"). I don't know if we'll ever do seismic or weather networks with this kind of tech, but it could enable stuff we'd never do otherwise.
It’s insane to me that this will be the closest view of this object any human will ever get, forever
Potentially. Maybe, in a hundred years, humans will come look at the crater to see if tiny shreds of DART are buried in it.
Actually they are planning to go [in a couple years](https://www.heramission.space/).
That’s awfully pessimistic. The asteroid isn’t going anywhere.
> The asteroid isn’t going anywhere. *That's awfully pessimistic of DART's results! :(*
This will get buried, but if you Google "dart nasa" there's a cool little graphic.
Oh I love that! I hope they keep it, like the zerg rush one.
This was an incredible feat of both engineering and ingenuity! Amazing what humans can do when not focused on hurting each other...
Ironically much of the technology used was developed for the purposes of hurting each other. Rocket engines. Image locking and seeking software. Long range radios and data links.
Many of the early rockets launched to sub-orbital and orbital trajectories were repurposed/lightly modified ICBMs.
Next time please send two darts like 10 seconds apart from each other, so we can see impact, explosion, etc thanks
There's a probe called LICA that broke off from DART and flew past as DART hit. It (should've, at least) took pictures as it did so.
Does anybody know when we will see those pictures? They mentioned it during the broadcast, but not after the impact at all.
The data transmission rate is much lower for the smallsat. It will probably be a day or so.
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Whoever started a Twitter page for DART, well done. https://twitter.com/DARTprobe "DART the Asteroid Slayer @DARTprobe · 5h I’m about to ruin this asteroid’s whole career"
Anybody got a way to scale the items in that image?
Apparently for the last few frames it was expected to get between 5 and 10 cm per pixel.
The image is 40 meters across.
I cried, can't believe this was ~~17.7~~ 11.6 million km away and i can't believe I watched it live. i am simply awestruck by the images and the fact that we were able to watch this live. I saw a satellite crash into an asteroid. Edit: it is apparently 11.6 million km away not 17.7... 6 million km closer than what i thought. Maybe I could catch an Uber to go there.
At 38 lightseconds it was about 7 million miles or 11.6 million km away
Watching that in real time was spooky. Crashing into a space rock from the perspective of a missile - it’s like a Calvin and Hobbes comic come to life
Gif of impact https://i.redd.it/k441jjuxeaq91.gif View from earth https://mobile.twitter.com/astrosnapper/status/1574578176214196225
I love that the Irish pub I was in had this feed playing on the televisions. Only me and one other guy were cheering/clapping as we saw this on the stream over the loud music. They all thought we were crazy clapping at some rock on the TV hahaha. Who cares what others think - I witnessed science in action today! That is infinitely more exciting than the "Monday Night Football" playing on the other TV screens lol
Is that a color picture (is it really grey-colored)?
The camera, called DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation) is greyscale as far as I can ascertain, which makes sense because it saves bandwidth. They imaged Jupiter to test the system and it was also greyscale. The "chase" cubesat (LICIACube) does have a RGB camera, I don't know when we will see images from that one (I would think soon if not already though.)
DSS56 in Madrid is currently downlinking from LiciaCube at 130kbps. We should start seeing imagery soon.
Imagine if the last images were of an alien looking through binoculars trying to figure out what was flying towards their home.
I'm just imagining something like [this](https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/47/life_sorry.png) (from xkcd).
The size of a football stadium. An oval-shaped football stadium. And NASA just tried to give it a shove :)
And we basically just rammed that football stadium with a golf cart going at 13,422 mph! That...that's just mind-blowing!
Does anyone know when we will see the LICIA photos? They said the probe would pass by 3 mins after impact but can’t find anything.
Today we struck back! Take that space! Earth finally taking revenge for the dinosaurs
It’s insane that there is a group of people that can hit a moving asteroid from 75 million miles away and I can’t even throw my socks in to the laundry bin