By Bob Walsh
I caught the tail-end of a news
flash today from NASA. It seems that their DART project, where they
crashed a satellite into an asteroid in an effort of deflect it was
HIGHLY successful. The blurb said that NASA would have regarded it as a
great success if it deflected the asteroid 10 minutes. In fact it
deflected the asteroid 32 minutes. (I presume they are talking about 32
minutes of angle rather than a measurement of time.)
By the way, one minute of angle is an angular measurement and equals 1.047 inches at 100 yards.
2 comments:
I was wrong. They were talking about linear speed. The small asteroid they nailed is orbiting around a larger asteroid and it is possible to time the speed of that rotation. They had hoped to change that speed of rotation by ten seconds. In fact they changed it by 32 seconds.
The hazards of making guesses based on partial information.
I saw where someone put up a pic of the outline of the Coyote' flattened on the side of an asteroid.
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