Should We Really Be Messing with Asteroid Orbits?
Things go bump in the cosmic night all the time. Rocky objects collide in planetary systems across our galaxy, providing astute astronomers with telltale signatures of warmly glowing dust from these grinding impacts. Stellar remnants like neutron stars can crash together unleashing bursts of searing gamma-rays, and even black holes can collide and coalesce in events marked by the gargantuan ringing of spacetime as energy ripples outward in gravitational waves.
On Sept. 26, 2022, another particularly novel kind of cosmic collision called out for attention in the quiet of space. A complicated package of machinery and electronics smashed at high speed into an ancient 200-meter-sized rubble-pile asteroid, known by some of the beings on the planet Earth as Dimorphos. Weighing in at around 600 kilos, this package was the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, an international mission led by NASA to attempt the first deliberate alteration of the orbit of a celestial body. Specifically, the moon-like orbit of Dimorphos around a larger asteroid known as Didymos, all while this tumbling pair tracks around the sun.
The technology to prevent asteroids from hitting Earth could also be used to cause asteroids
