Engineer Muhammad Shawkat Odeh, Director of the International Astronomy Center, confirmed that the Abu Dhabi-based Seal Astronomical Observatory will participate in analyzing the results of an experiment conducted by NASA to change the course of an asteroid for the first time in history, in order to study the effectiveness of changing the path of an asteroid that will collide with the Earth and pose a threat to it.
He said, "NASA launched its space probe called "DART", an acronym for the "Binary Asteroid Redirection Experiment", as the probe was launched on board a space rocket on November 24, 2021, heading to an asteroid called "Dimorphos", a small asteroid with a diameter of 160 meters orbiting an asteroid larger than its diameter. 780 meters long, his name is Didymus, which means "twin" in Greek.
He pointed out that the experiment aims to change the orbit of the small asteroid by colliding with the probe. Currently, the small asteroid revolves around the large asteroid once every 11 hours and 55 minutes, and the experiment hopes that the collision will change the orbit of the small asteroid to head inward and become a smaller and faster orbit, and thus less The duration of its rotation is a few seconds or minutes.
This asteroid does not pose any danger to Earth, but was chosen for astronomical considerations, including that it is easy to monitor by ground-based telescopes after the collision, so that it can be monitored by a large network of ground-based observatories to determine whether the experiment succeeded or not. Dangerous asteroid heading towards Earth.
The probe took a period of 10 months to reach the asteroid, and the collision will occur at dawn on Tuesday, September 27 at 03:13 am UAE time, and the speed of the probe at the moment of collision will be 22,000 kilometers per hour, and then the asteroid will be 11 million kilometers from Earth.
The diameter of the small asteroid is 100 times the diameter of the probe, and it is expected that the speed of the asteroid will change by only 0.1%, and the asteroid is now shining by 14.5. It is not possible to be certain what we will see from Earth at the time of the collision. Scientists will need several days or weeks after the collision to monitor and study the movement of the new small asteroid to know whether the experiment is successful or not.
He said, "The International Astronomy Center contacted the supervisor of this mission to make the Astronomical Seal Observatory one of the global observatories that participate in the photometric analysis of the asteroid after the collision to assess the success of the experiment. Indeed, the participation of the observatory was accepted as one of the participating observatories from the UAE. The Astronomical Seal Observatory will monitor the asteroid for a moment." The collision, in addition to making photometric observations afterwards, and sharing them with the mission supervisors, and the collision can be followed live on NASA TV.”
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