#dimorphos

[alascene]

The DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) just successfully slammed into Dimorphos, which is the moonlet of the asteroid Didymos (also affectionately called Didymoon). Over the next few days astronomers around the world will observe Didymos and Dimorphos to see if there has been a change in orbit from the latter. This is humanity's first real attempt at altering the course of a "killer" asteroid, even if this one isn't hazardous to us.

[child-of-earth-and-starry-heaven]

“Foreign to Olympus, a stranger coming to the city from the mysterious landscapes of the sea, the mountains, or the east, Dionysus, the god who subverted the traditional structures of the sacrifice, was at the same time the privileged son of Zeus, the first cousin of the king of Thebes — his native city — and the god who offered to man the possibility of establishing the most intimate communication with the sacred by means of enthusiasm and possession. The very being of Dionysus is the focal point of all of the important contradictions which human reason is unable to bear alone: between identity and otherness, presence and absence, imagination and reality, the absolute and nothingness, power and fragility, life and death, eternity and transition. An irruption of the sacred into the world, of the miracle at the heart of day-to-day life, of the irrational in the center of the city, he is the very paroxysm of tragic tension.”

—Jean-Pierre Darmon, from Mythologies by Yves Bonnefoy (translated by Wendy Doniger)

[mindblowingscience]

Europe's Hera probe to launch Oct. 7 to inspect asteroid NASA smacked in 2022

'We're very excited to go back and see what it looks like.'

Europe's highly anticipated Hera mission to catalog the wreckage of the asteroid Dimorphos has arrived at its Florida launch site for final checks ahead of its planned liftoff early next month. The main Hera spacecraft and its two partner cubesats, named Milani and Juventas, are set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Oct. 7 at 10:52 a.m. EDT (1452 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They'll arrive at Dimorphos in late 2026, on a mission to study the aftermath of NASA's planetary defense test, which intentionally smashed a spacecraft into the asteroid in September 2022, shortening its orbit by 33 minutes and permanently altering its shape.

Continue Reading.

[chibinotan]

Dimorphos

[netmassimo]

Five articles published in the journal 'Nature Communications' report different analyses of data collected by NASA's DART spacecraft and the

Five articles published in the journal "Nature Communications" report different analyses of data collected by NASA's DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube nanosatellite that accompanied it on its mission that ended with the collision with Dimorphos, a small satellite asteroid of Didymos, which occurred on September 26, 2022. Various teams of researchers with members in common offered possible reconstructions of the processes that led to the formation of the pair of asteroids and their characteristics. These studies are connected to the defense of the Earth from asteroid impacts.

[odinsblog]

While most folks were sitting down for supper, NASA tried to move a space mountain.

Beyond sight for backyard stargazers, a spacecraft the size of a vending machine self-destructed by ramming into a harmless asteroid shortly after 7 p.m. ET Monday, September 26th. The high-speed crash was part of the U.S. space agency's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART.

The moment of impact marked the first time in history humans have attempted to alter the path of an asteroid, a flying chunk of rubble left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of the time, these ancient rocks pose no danger to Earth, including Dimorphos, the one NASA just used for target practice. But at least three have caused mass extinctions, the most infamous of which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Stegosaurus didn't have NASA.

"We are changing the motion of a natural celestial body in space. Humanity has never done that before," said Tom Statler, program scientist. "This was the substance of fiction books and really corny episodes of Star Trek from when I was a kid, and now it's real."

(continue reading)

[carlyraejepsans]

incredibile job to everyone at NASA who worked and contributed to the mission, this was a pure scientific marvel, but I just can't shake the pure primal terror that was watching the asteroid get closer and closer on camera before impact. you just know indie horror game makers are gonna have a field day w this one lol

[beardedmrbean]

James Webb got got us this one

Alexandra Witze @alexwitze · 5h First @LICIACube images of the #DARTMission impact are out.

dude, nice