When NASA hits the asteroid, it flies car-sized rocks at 120 mph

When NASA’s dart spacecraft slammed into the asteroid’s second line of dioxide in 2022, it not only took the space rocks off the route, but also used up huge boulders on the surface, waving the size of a small car to reach 52 meters per second, the size of a small car.

Scientists analyzed images of the Italian cube Liciacube, which has tracked 104 single boulders that popped up from the impact, revealing violent demolition beyond all expectations.

The results show that surface features on asteroids may be more susceptible to impact than previously known, which has implications for planetary defense strategies and our understanding of how space rocks have developed for billions of years.

Going into vandalism

Liciacube fell behind Dart in just 167 seconds, capturing unprecedented cosmic demolition footage. The small spacecraft photographed clusters of boulders that flowed out of the line of dioxide in two different directions, a discovery surprised researchers who expected more random fragment patterns.

Analysis shows that these are not random blocks that explode from the crater. Instead, they appear to be broken remains of two protruding boulders on both sides of the scene: Atabaque in the south and Bodhran in the north. Dart’s solar panels hit the house-sized rock milliseconds before the main spacecraft fuselage hit the ground, shattering them into observed projectiles liciacube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbl07czuemu

“Clustering shows that these objects are popping up in the preferred direction,” the research team noted. The largest orbital debris had a radius of 3.6 meters (the size of the small house), although carrying enough power to completely escape the two motorcycles with the dioxygen and enter separate tracks around the sun.

High-speed demolition physics

The trajectory of the boulder tells an extraordinary story that influences physics at work. Most fragments follow two different paths:

• Southern Cluster: 74 high-speed boulders travel at shallow angles for 30-50 m/s
• Northeast Group: Slower debris move 10-20 m/s on steep tracks
• Dispersed people: Some isolated boulders, including the largest specimen
• Total momentum: More than three times the dart spacecraft itself

The southern megalithic stream has the most compelling meaning. The angles of these fragments pop up only at an angle of 4-25 degrees above the local surface, which actually jumps through space, just like stones on stones. Their combined momentum points are almost from the south of the Dimore word, perpendicular to the orbit of the asteroid.

This directional bias means that the boulder pop-up could tilt the orbital plane of Dimorphos up to a certain extent – ​​a subtle but measurable change in the upcoming European Space Agency HERA mission should be detected when arriving at the asteroid system in 2026.

The power of mobile satellites

Although DART successfully changed the orbital period of Dimorphos to 33 minutes, the boulder analysis revealed that the impact was much higher than initially calculated. The boulders of only 104 orbits carry a 1.1×10⁷kg meter per second to significantly disturb the asteroid’s rotation and orbital plane.

Scientists estimate that this shift in momentum may turn carbon dioxide into a rolling state, with its rotation axis being chaotic rather than smoothly rotating. In the low gravity environment of the asteroid belt, this complex rotation pattern can last for thousands of years.

The boulder’s ejection accounts for about 0.02% of the total mass of the dioxide, equivalent to a sphere with a radius of 4.6 meters. However, the calculation only includes fragments large enough to make Liciacube tracking – many smaller boulders were observed but could not be followed through multiple images.

Impact on planetary defense

These findings have profound implications for future planetary defense missions. DART experiments demonstrate that dynamic impactors can deflect asteroids, but the boulder analysis shows that the deflection mechanism is more complex than expected.

The surface boulder acts as a secondary projectile, amplifying momentum transfers in an unexpected direction. For real planetary defense scenarios, this may enhance or complicate deflection work, depending on the surface characteristics and internal structure of the asteroid.

The study also shows that small spacecraft can provide critical scientific data. Liciacube weighs only 14 kilograms and cannot obtain observations from Earth-based telescopes or even the Hubble Space Telescope.

When Hera arrives at Dimorphos in late 2026, an asteroid system that changes from the impact of DART – chaoticly shut down on a slightly tilted orbit, with fresh craters and surrounded by scars from boulders hitting them. The mission will provide a final chapter to see how relatively small spacecraft can reshape the entire world.

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