Meghan is a senior writer at Space.com and has more than five years' experience as a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Space.com in July 2018, with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon. Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University, and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums. Follow her on Twitter at @meghanbartels.
had sped up from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes, shaving off 32 minutes — on the high end of predictions.
Other work Ernst and her colleagues are doing recreates the impact itself. They calculated that the spacecraft flew in on a trajectory about 73 degrees above the local surface."So not quite vertical, but pretty close," she said. That's another valuable insight for planetary defense, since the impact angle influences how much a collision changes an asteroid's path.
But even without a detailed view of the crashed spacecraft, Ernst and her colleagues have mapped how it hit the asteroid's rocky surface. To do so, they used DART's final trajectory information and its last photo. "The first point of contact was likely that one solar array with boulder number two; that's the first thing that hit," she said."And then it does look like the second wing probably hit boulder number one just before the bus hit in the middle."
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