On September 26, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft will collide with the asteroid Dimorphos.
Dimorphos, at 150 metres in diameter, is the "moonlet" of a binary asteroid system, orbiting Didymos, the bigger partner asteroid (800 meters).
Dimorphos will experience a modest shift in velocity due to the momentum of the 600 kilogramme spacecraft flying at 6 km/s.
creating new approaches for simulating the range of possible asteroid targets and more accurately modelling the DART mission
According to a new research published in The Planetary Science Journal, "Effects of Spacecraft Geometry on Kinetic Impactor Missions,
For the DART spacecraft, most impact modellers used idealised forms such as a sphere, cube, or disc.
"Almost all of that study has focused on the effects of distinct asteroid features on the outcome.
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