User:Ricktn
About Me
[edit]I have been in the IT business for over 35 years, starting as a mainframe operator to programmer, systems analyst, manager, director and Vice President of Technology. Because of some health issues I now find myself with lots of free time which I'm using to learn more about the online cyberworld. My online experience goes back to the early 1980's when I had one of those first CompuServe accounts, then experience with BBSs (with a 300 baud modem), to AOL, then Netscape Navigator, IE, Firefox, et al. With my new "free time" I'm trying to explore and understand the Internet of the 21st century - Web 2.0, etc.
18 November 2024 |
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects. The target object, Dimorphos, is a 160-meter-long (525-foot) minor-planet moon of the asteroid Didymos. DART was launched on 24 November 2021 and successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 while about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth. The collision shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 32 minutes and was mostly achieved by the momentum transfer associated with the recoil of the ejected debris, which was larger than the impact. This video is a timelapse of DART's final five and a half minutes before impacting Dimorphos, and was compiled from photographs captured by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), the spacecraft's 20-centimeter-aperture (7.9-inch) camera, and transmitted to Earth in real time. The replay is ten times faster than reality, except for the last six images, which are shown at the same rate at which the spacecraft returned them. Both Didymos and Dimorphos are visible at the start of the video, and the final frame shows a patch of Dimorphos's surface 16 meters (51 feet) across. DART's impact occurred during transmission of the final image, resulting in a partial frame. Video credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL
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