Asteroid-smashing NASA probe sent boulders into space

AFP | Paris

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

When a NASA spacecraft successfully knocked an asteroid off course last year it sent dozens of boulders skittering into space, images from the Hubble telescope showed.

NASA’s fridge-sized DART probe smashed into the pyramid-sized, rugby ball-shaped asteroid Dimorphos roughly 11 million kilometres (6.8 million miles) from Earth in September last year.

The spacecraft knocked the asteroid significantly off course in the first-ever such test of Earth’s planetary defences. New images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show that the collision also sent 37 boulders -- ranging from one metre (three feet) to seven metres (22 feet) across -- floating into the cosmos.

They represent around two percent of the boulders that were already scattered across the surface of the loosely-held-together asteroid, scientists estimated in a new study. The finding suggests that possible future missions to divert life-threatening asteroids heading towards Earth could also spray off boulders in our direction.

But these particular rocks do not pose any threat to Earth -- indeed they have barely gone anywhere. They are drifting away from Dimorphos at around a kilometre (half a mile) per hour -- roughly the speed a giant tortoise walks, Hubble said in a statement.