totm oct 2022 DART: Double Asteroid Redirection Test

[intelliCom]

1 minute ago, Minmus Taster said:

This has gotta be the only time I have felt good about a crash!

Best view of Dimorphos:

It's clearly a rubble pile like we thought, elongated probably because of the rotation, I wonder if it even survived seeing what OSIRIS did to Bennu

You know, it's funny. As far as I remember, most depictions of asteroids were individual solid masses with big, noticable craters on them. While such a thing is true for moons like Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea, Hyperion, etc., it seems as though a lot of asteroids are truly just round masses of sand, with many large rocks scattered within. 

[sevenperforce]

6 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

7 minutes ago, intelliCom said:

Could someone send me a ping (i.e., say "@intelliCom") when there's a timelapse of DART moving toward impact?

Well.... technically it was already timelapse.     But I'll post something if I see something. 

 

[Zozaf Kerman]

@intelliCom, we have a Timelapse!

[intelliCom]

4 minutes ago, Zozaf Kerman said:

@intelliCom, we have a Timelapse!

I mean a timelapse where the images don't appear as though you're trying to run KSP on a computer from the 90s; a 'fast' timelapse, if you will.

[cubinator]

Well, I guess now we just have to wait for cubesat images and for it to go around a few times.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

7 minutes ago, intelliCom said:

You know, it's funny. As far as I remember, most depictions of asteroids were individual solid masses with big, noticable craters on them. While such a thing is true for moons like Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea, Hyperion, etc., it seems as though a lot of asteroids are truly just round masses of sand, with many large rocks scattered within. 

This is true - and not just for us!  You can look at the renders NASA put out and see the 'catered rock' that is the classical image of an asteroid, not the rubble pile seen tonight. 

[HebaruSan]

2 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

This is true - and not just for us!  You can look at the renders NASA put out and see the 'catered rock' that is the classical image of an asteroid, not the rubble pile seen tonight. 

I guess the ambient material in space only coalesces into solid surfaces when it's being compressed into a body the size of a moon or larger? Kind of surprising in retrospect that we didn't guess that.

[cubinator]

1 minute ago, HebaruSan said:

I guess the ambient material in space only coalesces into solid surfaces when it's being compressed into a body the size of a moon or larger? Kind of surprising in retrospect that we didn't guess that.

Well there seems to be various levels of that. The asteroid is made of rocks that ARE solid and formed somehow. But usually the rocks are just piled together in a big group unless they somehow get hot enough to melt together. Even big, cratery asteroids like Phobos can be rubble piles too, just too big to see the boulders on from full view.

[Nuke]

a lot of the boulders are likely the shrapnel left over from planet formation.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

 

 

[ExtremeSquared]

Was having trouble parsing what the final partial transmission was.

[sevenperforce]

23 minutes ago, intelliCom said:

I mean a timelapse where the images don't appear as though you're trying to run KSP on a computer from the 90s; a 'fast' timelapse, if you will.

Well it was in real-time.

But here, I sped it up to 300%.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRmNTftj/

 

And in case TikTok isn’t embedding properly:

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

47 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

I guess the ambient material in space only coalesces into solid surfaces when it's being compressed into a body the size of a moon or larger? Kind of surprising in retrospect that we didn't guess that.

 

43 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Well there seems to be various levels of that. The asteroid is made of rocks that ARE solid and formed somehow. But usually the rocks are just piled together in a big group unless they somehow get hot enough to melt together. Even big, cratery asteroids like Phobos can be rubble piles too, just too big to see the boulders on from full view.

I suspect that there are planetary remnants out there that are the solid metal rich dinosaur killing asteroids of legend, as well as the amalgamated gravel piles seen recently.  Just because today's mission and Bennu and the weird KBO we've imaged in the last decade are not hard cratered remnants does not mean those things are not whizzing about looking for a city to flatten 

Of course, having written that - those dense buggers could have cloaked themselves in a nice blanket of gravel and be virtually indistinguishable... 

---     - - -     - - - 

"As for the details of that impact, we'll have to wait. The best images we'll get are from an Italian Cubesat called LICIACube that has been trailing DART since the two separated a few weeks ago. LICIACube will be about 50 km from the point of impact and will get even closer over the three minutes after impact before passing behind Dimorphos. But it will take some time to transmit images to Earth—possibly a day or more for processing and release."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/dart-goes-silent-after-hitting-an-asteroid/%3famp=1

Edited September 27, 2022 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[cubinator]

10 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I suspect that there are planetary remnants out there that are the solid metal rich dinosaur killing asteroids of legend, as well as the amalgamated gravel piles seen recently.  Just because today's mission and Bennu and the weird KBO we've imaged in the last decade are not hard cratered remnants does not mean those things are not whizzing about looking for a city to flatten 

Solid metal is indeed the composition of perhaps my favorite asteroid, 16 Psyche, which is targeted by an orbiter mission in the near future.  

[Singhnaut]

That last photo was...interesting

Also, what kind of engine did they use?

[intelliCom]

5 minutes ago, Singhnaut said:

That last photo was...interesting

Also, what kind of engine did they use?

Double Asteroid Redirection Test - Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia, an electric ion thruster.

[Singhnaut]

Just now, intelliCom said:

Double Asteroid Redirection Test - Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia, an electric ion thruster.

I thought so. It looked like one. Looks like ISP electronics has become partners with NASA!

[cubinator]

 

It sure hit it!

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

8 minutes ago, cubinator said:

 

It sure hit it!

Daaaaamn! 

I'm guessing they were tracking Didymos and not the craft? 

Because - that was a Ton of ejecta... Now I'm even more excited about the Hubble and Webb images! 

[cubinator]

23 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Daaaaamn! 

I'm guessing they were tracking Didymos and not the craft? 

Because - that was a Ton of ejecta... Now I'm even more excited about the Hubble and Webb images! 

Seems to be tracking Didymos, yes. I think the debris plume mostly travels out in the opposite direction of the spacecraft's approach. 

Edit: Unless the asteroid is moving faster than Earth, which I think it probably is. And the spacecraft might be coming in from ahead. I don't know anymore. I'd have to make some vectors.

Edited September 27, 2022 by cubinator

[tater]

try googling "double asteroid redirection test"

 

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, intelliCom said:

You know, it's funny. As far as I remember, most depictions of asteroids were individual solid masses with big, noticable craters on them. While such a thing is true for moons like Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea, Hyperion, etc., it seems as though a lot of asteroids are truly just round masses of sand, with many large rocks scattered within. 

Expectations:

Reality:

[intelliCom]

47 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Expectations:

Reality:

Replace stone with endstone and you've got the image I had in my head

[intelliCom]

7 hours ago, intelliCom said:

You know, it's funny. As far as I remember, most depictions of asteroids were individual solid masses with big, noticable craters on them. While such a thing is true for moons like Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea, Hyperion, etc., it seems as though a lot of asteroids are truly just round masses of sand, with many large rocks scattered within. 

Update to this; turns out even NASA depicts asteroids as solid rocks with craters.

DART (jhuapl.edu)

Also, I would like to append what I said earlier; technically all rocky celestial bodies (in a vacuum) are round, coalesced mounds of gravel (Yes, even the Moon), but the larger the body is, the less obvious the gravel is. It seems like for any rocky body about the size of Bennu or Dimorphos (Average is between 100m - 500m), the gravelly appearance should be far more obvious. For a body like Arrokoth (10,000m on shortest dimension), the body appears smooth.

Should I start up a thread on "The Dimensions of a Gravelly Body vs a Smooth One"? Would be useful to predict the appearance of an asteroid with a combination of dimensions and composition.

[SunlitZelkova]

18 minutes ago, intelliCom said:

Update to this; turns out even NASA depicts asteroids as solid rocks with craters.

To be fair though this isn’t necessarily “NASA” as the group of scientists and engineers we know and love so much as it is concept artists with a huge free hand and their overseer PR officials who don’t care as long as it trends.

They regularly get exhaust wrong for launches, also images of exhaust during Mars EDL in graphics is incorrect on their part too. I’m sure others have their own fair share of errors they have seen.

But the people who review it are probably PR people, not actual engineers, so it passes. That doesn’t mean that “NASA” (the actual science people) consider a majority of asteroids to look that way in their personal view.

I bet that those depictions come from fantastical pre-detailed space exploration (i.e. the age of telescopes and Mars canals, instead of probes and disappointing Venusian and Martian atmospheric pressure readings) that have simply remained in pop culture since then despite new discoveries, just as how films nowadays often depict Mars as having fantastic mesas and valleys despite the majority of it being something of a flat plain.

When people eventually visit an asteroid and/or Mars those depictions will become more realistic, just as landing on the Moon in ‘69 made the equally grandiose and absurd lunar mesas and valleys go away (although the actual Moon, and thus Mars and asteroids, is/are spectacular in its/their own right, and those fantastical depictions are still nice as pure art so nothing is/will be lost ).