Hey asteroid 2024 YR4 watchers! I'm seeing a lot of people claim that, if it is going to impact Earth in 2032, we can use a DART-like spacecraft to ram it out of the way. Well, not necessarily. The DART mission was fab, but might not be able to stop 2024 YR4. Let me explain 👇 - ThreadSky

squigglyvolcano.bsky.social • 28 days ago

Hey asteroid 2024 YR4 watchers! I'm seeing a lot of people claim that, if it is going to impact Earth in 2032, we can use a DART-like spacecraft to ram it out of the way.

Well, not necessarily. The DART mission was fab, but might not be able to stop 2024 YR4.

Let me explain 👇

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squigglyvolcano.bsky.social•28 days ago

The DART mission was Earth's first planetary defense experiment, and it was an incredible success. It's the main narrative arc of my book for a good reason: it showed, for the very first time, that we can rearrange the cosmos to make it more habitable.

squigglyvolcano.bsky.social•28 days ago

It's aim was to crash a van-size largely autonomous spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, which orbited a larger asteroid named Didymos. Their aim was to "deflect" Dimorphos—in this case, by shrinking its roughly 12-hour-long orbit around Didymos by 73 seconds.

squigglyvolcano.bsky.social•28 days ago

If it worked, it proved that a type of asteroid deflection technique -- using a kinetic impactor spacecraft to deflect an asteroid away from Earth -- works on a fundamental level. Nobody had ever tried anything like this before, so no-one could be sure if it would work.

squigglyvolcano.bsky.social•28 days ago

It worked wonders: it shrank Dimorphos' orbit by 33 minutes, making the deflection 25x more effective than the baseline. It did this because, as DART smashed into the asteroid, lots of debris flew back off the asteroid, acting like a rocket jet and giving it more of a push.

squigglyvolcano.bsky.social•28 days ago

One of my favourite parts of the DART mission is that it knocked off so much debris from this asteroid that it created a 30,000km-long comet-like tail that persisted for many months after impact day.

squigglyvolcano.bsky.social•28 days ago

So, DART worked. But it doesn't mean we can use kinetic impactors like it to deflect any asteroid whenever we want, and that's for several reasons.

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