Asteroid smashed to bits by NASA rocket could now hit Mars

NASA loves experimenting in space. So much so it launched a mission to blow up an asteroid.

And now the remnants of that test have directed the space rock towards Earth's neighbouring planet, Mars.

It was back in 2022 that NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission as a way of testing a new form of defending the planet in case a killer asteroid was ever to head towards our planet.

The purpose of the $324 million scientific experiment was to see how much momentum would be needed to deflect the asteroid when hitting it head on.

Then on 26 September, 2022, DART smacked directly into the asteroid of choice, dubbed Dimorphos, which was a minor-planet moon of the asteroid called Didymos.

Dimorphos posed zero threat to Earth during the experiment, with it being around 11 million kilometres from our planet when struck.

The experiment was an overwhelming success, shortening its orbit of Didymos by 32 minutes when the experiment had hoped to shorten it by 73 seconds.

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But its bad news for Mars now, with what's left of Dimorphos - a field of 37 space boulders, each between four to seven metres in size - set to orbit Mars before crashing into its surface.

The outcome was simulated before the findings were published in a new study.

The author of the study is Marco Fenucci, a near-Earth object dynamicist at the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Objects Coordination Centre.

He said 'they're going to cross the orbit of Mars... and they will arrive to the ground and make a crater' if both Mars and the mini asteroid cloud cross paths.

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This wont be any time soon, mind. The study simulated how the boulders will orbit the Sun for the next 20,000 years.

"We did not expect that many boulders that were that big to be blown off,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Applied Physics Laboratory who was one of the DART mission’s investigation team leads.

Rivkin added: “We think that those have to be pre-existing boulders that the shockwave threw off. They were not created during the impact.”

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Exactly when the space boulders will crash in to Mars isn't known but the estimate is down at around 6,000 years from now. Those that didn't make ground and remained in orbit are expected to return to Mars in 13,000 years for another crash landing.

The danger to humanity comes. down to whether humanity continues to explore Mars and eventually send astronauts to the planet.