NASA’s DART Impact To Spark Human-caused Meteor Showers? What We Know – News18

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) project was set up to test a mechanism to deflect an asteroid for planetary defence known as the “kinetic impactor”. On September 26, 2022, the DART spacecraft purposely crashed with the asteroid Dimorphos, slamming into the space rock at about 24,000 km/h. Now, millions of microscopic pieces of space rock might be headed for Earth and Mars. The celestial shrapnel does not endanger life but might generate the first meteor showers ever caused by humans.

Over 2 million pounds of rocks and dust might have been created, said scientists. Recent research indicates that pieces of Dimorphos may land on Earth and Mars in the next 10 to 30 years, and that meteor showers may continue for up to a century. However, the probability of the dust particles reaching the earth’s surface is low.

According to CNN, Eloy Peña Asensio, the principal study author and postdoctoral researcher with the Deep-space Astrodynamics Research and Technology group at Italy’s Polytechnic University of Milan, “this material could produce visible meteors (commonly called shooting stars) as they penetrate the Martian atmosphere.”

The debris may produce a light display over the Earth. Asensio said debris may break through the Martian atmosphere and generate observable meteors, often known as shooting stars.

He said that although the particles would be tiny—they may be as little as a smartphone or a grain of sand—the Earth’s surface won’t be in danger.

To get video of the crash and the debris cloud that resulted from it, scientists used information collected by a tiny satellite that split away from the spacecraft before contact.

Asensio and his team ran simulations of the impact’s three million particles, accounting for the gravitational pull of Didymos, Dimorphos, the sun, and other planets.

They calculated that if the debris set off Dimorphos at 1,800 km/h, some of it may make it to Mars, while smaller, faster bits at 5750 km/h might make it to Earth in less than a decade.