A bunch of amateur astronomy lovers captured a NASA spaceship crashing into an asteroid

Can we wipe out asteroids? The Greenfield boyce of September 26, 1986, and the fate of a risk to the Earth

If you had asked me 30 years ago, can we be sure that we won’t be wiped out by an asteroid a week from now? Tom Statler, the DART programme scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington DC, says he would have to say no. He says we’ll know what to do about it when something new is found after the fact, after astronomy surveyed the skies to identify nearly all the dangerous asteroids.

DART approached Dimorphos on September 26, and the asteroid looked like an egg covered in boulders. It seems to be a loose pile of rubble barely held together by gravity — whose surface would probably shatter spectacularly when DART hit it.

Dimorphos is 151 metres wide and orbits the larger asteroid Didymos. The goal of NASA was to change Dimorphos’s position in order to make it easier for astronomer to see the changes over time. Neither asteroid is, or will ever be, a threat to Earth.

The Greenfieldboyce. Andy Cheng is one of the investigators. He says there was so much rocky material shooting out, the asteroid got an extra kick.

Researchers say the results could be applicable to future hazard because NASA demonstrated the technique only on one asteroid. “It means that we can quickly design a mission to deflect an asteroid if there is a threat, and we know that this has a very high chance of being effective,” says Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

NAMA-MADE-History by Knocking an Asteroid Off-course Now Its Publishing-the-Data: Evidence from NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility

This colour change was confirmed by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, as reported by Cristina Thomas, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, at a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “We think this is likely because we have a lot of material from Dimorphos thrown off,” she says. The impact blasted through the asteroid’s weathered interior and exposed part of its insides, making everything look redder — at least until the fresh material dissipated.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Once the spacecraft went whammo, those images stopped. The impact kicked up a huge cloud of dust and debris, which telescopes on the ground and in space showed.

CHENG is an ancient Chinese word. The gun kicks back against you when it’s fired the same way as if you shoot a bullet back. So that’s – the recoil force is an extra force that’s pushing against the asteroid.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Next year, the European Space Agency will send out a mission that will take close-up pictures of the asteroid, revealing aspects like the crater and mass of the object, all of which will help to explain how to push asteroids around. NPR News correspondent, NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/01/1160457205/nasa-made-history-by-knocking-an-asteroid-off-course-now-its-publishing-the-data

Observing Asteroid Impact in Kenya with the Unistellar Telescope Network: Reddening or Optical Effects?

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Space telescopes like Hubble and JWST were able to see the effects of the impact in great detail, but they missed the impact itself by just a few minutes. That’s because these telescopes are highly sensitive and can observe very distant targets, but it’s hard to move them into the exact right position to catch a relatively close and very fast-moving object like an asteroid in our solar system.

The location of the Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean made it possible to get observations with a network of telescopes. Graykowski works with the Unistellar telescope network to get data from both individual telescope users and science outreach groups like the Traveling Telescope project, which promotes science education around Kenya and which organized a special observation event in Nairobi for the DART impact.

The network captured both the initial impact and the second cloud of material, which was thrown up when the ship struck the asteroid. “So the citizen science was a very necessary tool.”

“So that wasn’t just a fluke in the Deep Impact mission — we see it here too,” Graykowski said. The question is if the reddening is due to the composition of the asteroid or if it is an optical effect. That would be really cool because that would tell us about the material that makes up the asteroids. And the asteroids are some of the oldest bodies in the solar system.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23622777/dart-mission-nasa-asteroid-crash-amateur-astronomer

Observing with a Network of Telescopes: How Much Time Should I Have to Pay? The Case of a Citizen Science Network

There are many advantages to a citizen science network like it can be used for continuous observations. Major telescopes are oversubscribed, meaning more researchers want time on them than can be accommodated, so it’s both hard to get observing time and extremely difficult to observe an event right as it happens. But with a network, there’s always someone watching.