A highschool trainer and his college students have found that an asteroid hit by a NASA spacecraft, in a check run for saving Earth from a collision, is behaving unexpectedly. The discover might have implications for future planetary defence missions.
On 27 September 2022, NASA deliberately crashed its Double Asteroid Redirection Check (DART) spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos. The objective was to gradual the house rock’s almost 12-hour orbit round a guardian asteroid, known as Didymos, and …