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In so doing, the mission successfully demonstrated a proposed strategy for deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids – the kinetic impact method.will rendezvous with the double-asteroid system and perform a detailed post-impact survey of Dimorphos to ensure that this method of planetary defense can be repeated in the future.
The asteroid Dimorphos was captured by NASA's DART mission just two seconds before the spacecraft struck its surface on Sept. 26, 2022. Observations of the asteroid before and after impact suggest it is a loosely packed"rubble pile" object. This data allowed the team to constrain the initial conditions of the ejecta, including its trajectories and velocities – ranging from a few tens of meters per second to about 500 m/s .
Their results indicated that some of these particles would reach Earth and Mars within a decade or more, depending on how fast they traveled after the impact. Peña-Asensio and his colleagues also note that future Mars observation missions will have the opportunity to witness Martian meteors as fragments of Didymos burn up in its atmosphere.
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