Earth in danger of being hit by asteroid Dimorphos debris. Impact might happen in...

Earth is in danger of being hit by an asteroid moonlet debris that NASA blew up two years back. The DART mission, or the Double Asteroids Redirect Test, struck Dimorphos, the small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. The experiment aimed to understand a proposed strategy whereby potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) could be deflected.

The impact sent several pieces of debris flying in space and scientists say that Mars is likely to be hit by them in the future. However, turns out, that not just Mars, but our home planet also faces the dangerous prospect of being impacted. The kinetic method creates a lot of debris that can have a dangerous impact on several celestial bodies.

A recent study tried to understand how an impact mission like DART can trigger the formation of debris which could someday reach Earth and Mars as meteors. The results of simulations carried out as part of the study state that the asteroid ejecta could reach Mars and the Earth-Moon system within a decade. Three million particles created by the DART mission's impact with Dimorphos were tracked to learn more about what would happen to them.

The paper is available online on the arXiv preprint server and accepted for publication by The Planetary Science Journal.

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To conduct the study, scientists used data obtained by the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube). The CubeSat had accompanied the DART mission at the time and witnessed the kinetic impact test.

Supercomputers at NASA's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) were used to simulate what would happen to them.

They found that some of this debris will reach Earth within 10 years, depending on their speed. So particles travelling at velocities below 500 m/s might take 13 years to reach Mars. But ejecta moving beyond 1.5 km/s (5,400 km/h; 3,355 mph) could reach Earth in seven years.

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Dr Eloy Peña-Asensio, who led the study and is a Research Fellow with the Deep-space Astrodynamics Research and Technology (DART) group at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, told Universe Today, "These faster particles are expected to be too small to produce visible meteors, based on early observations."

She added that "meteor observation campaigns will be critical in determining whether DART has created a new (and human-created) meteor shower: the Dimorphids."

"If these ejected Dimorphos fragments reach Earth, they will not pose any risk. Their small size and high speed will cause them to disintegrate in the atmosphere, creating a beautiful luminous streak in the sky," she added.

Future Mars observation missions might also be able to observe Martian meteors, she added.