Boom!

[Lew Zealand]

NASA just hit a teeny tiny asteroid with a spacecraft for the purpose of seeing how far they could move it to test, among other things, planetary defense.

Yeah but really they got to totally smash an asteroid and stuff!

You are the spacecraft boomthing:

3....

2....

1....

BOOM!

Cosmic billiards.

 

[Magically Clueless]

oh this is so neat! i don't keep up with space news and i'm always thankful people around me do lol

i reckon this got them some good-ish results?

 

[Lew Zealand]

oh this is so neat! i don't keep up with space news and i'm always thankful people around me do lol

i reckon this got them some good-ish results?

They hit it dead center as intended but the lil bitty asteroid is orbiting another larger (but still pretty small) asteroid and the change in the li'l one's orbit will determine how successful this was. Apparently it will take some time to repeatedly observe the small change in the orbital period to get enough data for the final conclusion. I believe it's supposed to be a <1% change? Sounds small but when you make that small change early enough, the orbital changes accumulates over time to very big distance differences, which may be needed if we ever spot something heading our way...

 

[Lew Zealand]

Video of the impact from the ATLAS Project which was tracking the asteroid:

https://twitter.com/fallingstarIfA/status/1574583529731670021

Hmmm, maybe the spacecraft was full of powder puffs? The asteroid's face did look like it could use some touching up...

 

[Confused]

Finally, my kind of POV.

 

[LRangerR]

DON'T WANNA CLOOOOSE MY EYYYES

 

[Cuusardo]

Makes me think of the White Hole episode of Red Dwarf.

 

[Odin]

This was a really interesting stream, although I ended up watching it slightly after it was live. Just the fact that we could get regular photos all the way up to the impact is really impressive! Hopefully this test ends up being successful!