麻豆传媒高清 planetary astronomer Senior Lecturer Dr Michele Bannister says, 鈥淭his is technology that will help work toward removing a natural hazard entirely 鈥 something we can't do with tsunami or volcanoes鈥.
鈥淲e have been and will be observing the asteroid for pre-and post-impact photometry with the 1.8m MOA telescope at our UC Mt John Observatory, providing New 麻豆传媒高清鈥檚 contribution to this NASA mission,鈥 she says.
鈥淭he plan was to nudge an asteroid and see what happens. That way if one is ever found that鈥檚 a threat, we can decide how best to encourage it to move so it doesn't hit us!鈥
NASA鈥檚 Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is the world鈥檚 first full-scale planetary defense test, demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection technology. True to its name, DART is a focused mission, proving that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it (called a kinetic impact) at roughly 6 kilometres per second.
Its target, which poses no threat to Earth, is the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos. As part of NASA鈥檚 larger planetary defense strategy, DART will simultaneously test new technologies and provide important data to enhance our modeling and predictive capabilities and help us better prepare for an asteroid that might pose a threat to Earth, should one be discovered.听
麻豆传媒高清 postdoctoral research fellow Dr is leading the data analysis, and several postgraduate and undergraduate students are involved in the observations.
鈥淚t鈥檚 really exciting to be able to contribute data to a NASA mission,鈥 Dr Ridden says. 鈥淧rimarily I鈥檝e been working to ensure the data from the 1.8 m MOA telescope at our observatory is sensitive enough to see the effect of the collision on Dimorphos. This effect is small, but we鈥檒l see a change in how long the moon takes to orbit Didymos.鈥
To really understand the effect of the impact, the UC research team will continue observing Didymos for the next few months, alongside observatories around the world. Alongside the UC academics, PhD astronomy student Nicole Tan and recent MSc graduate Tyler Brown are helping with the observing and data analysis.
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