Collision with NASA spacecraft altered shape of asteroid Dimorphos

When NASA sent its DART spacecraft to slam into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, the U.S. space agency demonstrated that it was possible to change a celestial object's trajectory, if needed, to protect Earth. Thus, its global strength is quite low, allowing deformation much more easily than for a solid monolithic body," said Steve Chesley, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and a co-author of the study published in the Planetary Science Journal. The spacecraft collided on Sept. 26, 2022, at about 14,000 miles per hour into Dimorphos, an asteroid that was about 560 feet wide, roughly 6.8 million miles from Earth. DART's collision, which sent rocky debris from the asteroid flying into space, also changed the orbital path that Dimorphos takes around Didymos - making it elliptical instead of circular - and its orbital period, the time it takes to complete a single orbit, the scientists said.