In September 2022, NASA undertook a mission to divert the trajectory of an asteroid, and although the operation was a success, it generated unexpected consequences. Analysis of debris ejected from the asteroid Dimorphos after the impact of the DART spacecraft has revealed that some rocks may now be headed towards Mars.
Currently, this news does not seem worrying, given that Mars is uninhabited, but in the future, when there could be manned missions to the red planet, these fragments could represent a non-negligible risk. Dimorphos, part of a binary asteroid pair with Didymos, was the target of the DART mission, aimed at testing our ability to change the orbits of potentially Earth-threatening asteroids.
However, the impact released numerous rock fragments into space, some of which, according to studies conducted by astronomers Marco Fenucci of the European Space Agency and Albino Carbognani of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, they could hit Mars, generating craters up to 300 meters in diameter.
Numerical simulations of the impact, extending up to 20,000 years into the future, highlighted that four of the bolides observed by the Hubble Space Telescope could get close enough to Mars to impact directly on its soil. Although Mars is already a planet dotted with space rocks and craters, these new impacts could provide further data on Martian geological processes and on the dynamics of asteroid impacts.
On INIU Power Bank, 10000mAh Ultra Thin & Lightweight Recharge R It is one of today’s best sellers.
