Asteroid behaving unexpectedly after Nasa’s deliberate Dart crash::A school teacher and his students have discovered that an asteroid deliberately hit by a Nasa spacecraft is behaving in a weird way.
…heard on the TV in the background while the main character is leaving the house.
One of their neighbours has to be erratically throwing their family and stuff into the car, awkwardly saying hey to the main character as they jump in their car and speed off.
The summary bot didn’t even list the odd behavior. It has continued to decelerate a month after impact. Find that a bit unusual and counterintuitive to newton’s laws. But I’m not a physicist.
It appears to be slowing down. That means it’s either generating thrust (outgassing etc), still being impacted by debris, or their measurements have been thrown off by something. All would be interesting, in their own way.
Somewhere a dev in the real world is scrambling to fix the bug in the simulation’s physics engine.
I guess they broke their engine! /s
So did NASA not track the asteroid for the last year? Like they just crash a rocket into it and call it good right away? No follow up or deeper analysis? You’d think they would want to monitor it for any weird or unexpected behavior but instead they find out from a high school teacher?
People still think
tachyonsneutrinos move faster than light because a professional laboratory gathered data incorrectly one time… I’m not saying these high schoolers messed up their data collection, but it seems more likely than them discovering a new physical phenomenonWow, TIL
The teams behind the DART mission are tracking it, and will continue to track it into the future. There is even a new mission set to launch to send another craft to the asteroid to gather more information. So, yeah lots of follow up to come over the next year. It is just far more likely that they don’t really have much to say ATM aside from well, that is not acting as predicted, we need more evidence/data to figure out what exactly is going on. Which is what this students paper basically concluded.
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-dart-impact.html gives a far better overview of the situation than the BBC article linked above.
NASA is run by the federal government. It would make sense that they wouldn’t report something like that, at least at this time, in order to avoid an overreaction by the public.
This is one of the more fascinating space stories. The modeling for such an object should be (relatively speaking), rather simple. Something isn’t going to speed up or slow down without a force being applied to it. So NASA should be able to model this quite accurately.
Guessing it’s not perfectly simple because the splatter, dust, heat energy released, oblique angle of impact, etc.
Space Balls colliding are a bit trickier than clacker balls.
{edited to say Space Balls}
Bah, what are we paying those nerds for anyway? Just math it out!
We woke it up
To be fair, it’s like playing billiards with a rope for a cue, in 3 dimensions, in zero gravity, with rocks for balls, and a coke can for the white, and the balls are moving.
I’m surprised they even hit it, give them a few years before you start expecting them to do trickshots.
They say, the dart was about the size of a fridge. It started in Nov 2021 and finished in Sep 2022. About a year later.
I say, there was still a pizza in the fridge.
Because, when you eat a year old pizza, it can slow you down a little, afterwards…
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