{"id":51988,"date":"2026-03-08T00:36:01","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T00:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/?p=51988"},"modified":"2026-03-08T00:36:01","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T00:36:01","slug":"a-first-for-humanity-confirmed-nasas-dart-mission-slowed-the-asteroids-orbitutm_sourcerss1-0mainlinkanonutm_mediumfeed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/2026\/03\/08\/a-first-for-humanity-confirmed-nasas-dart-mission-slowed-the-asteroids-orbitutm_sourcerss1-0mainlinkanonutm_mediumfeed\/","title":{"rendered":"A First for Humanity Confirmed: NASA&#8217;s DART Mission Slowed the Asteroid&#8217;s Orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- Africa tv video display -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"3579572842\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\">\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"fhbody-180926020\">\n<div id=\"text-180926020\" class=\"p\">\n<p>\t\t\t\tNASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity \u2014 &#8220;the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It was 2022&#8217;s DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid \u2014 and the experiment &#8220;could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes,&#8221; writes <em>ScienceNews<\/em>:<br \/>\n<i><br \/>\nA spacecraft slowed the orbit of a pair of asteroids around the sun by more than 10 micrometers per second&#8230;  Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos&#8217; 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun.  <\/i><\/p>\n<p>To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars&#8217; light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance&#8230; Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids&#8217; orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren&#8217;t before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid&#8217;s orbit can help make defense plans against another, &#8220;in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real.&#8221;   <br \/>The researchers spent nearly two and a half years to collect 22 measurements of the asteroid&#8217;s post-crash position, relying on amateur astronomers &#8220;to go out into the middle of nowhere and observe the necessary stellar occultations,&#8221; acvcording to their paper.  Planetary defense researcher even tells <em>ScienceNews<\/em> &#8220;There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<p><script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- Africa tv video display -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-1669381584671856\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"3579572842\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\">\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script><br \/>\n#Humanity #Confirmed #NASAs #DART #Mission #Slowed #Asteroids #Orbit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity \u2014 &#8220;the first time a human-made object has&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mzansi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51989,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51988\/revisions\/51989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eduzim.co.zw\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}