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Dimorphos (formal designation (65803) Didymos I; provisional designation S/2003 (65803) 1) is a natural satellite or moon of the near-Earth asteroid 65803 Didymos, with which it forms a binary system.
65803 Didymos (provisional designation 1996 GT) is a sub-kilometer asteroid and binary system that is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid and near-Earth object of the Apollo group. [ a ] The asteroid was discovered in 1996 by the Spacewatch survey at Kitt Peak , and its small 160-meter minor-planet moon , named Dimorphos , was ...
Didymos and Dimorphos do not pose an actual threat to Earth. DART struck Dimorphos on Sept. 26, 2022, at about 14,000 miles per hour (22,530 kph) at a distance of roughly 6.8 million miles (11 ...
The primary asteroid (Didymos A) is about 780 metres (2,560 ft) in diameter; the asteroid moon Dimorphos (Didymos B) is about 160 metres (520 ft) in diameter in an orbit about 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) from the primary. [15] The mass of the Didymos system is estimated at 528 billion kg, with Dimorphos comprising 4.8 billion kg of that total. [21]
The team concluded that Dimorphos likely spun off from Didymos in what is known as a "large mass shedding event," which are natural processes that speed up the spinoff of smaller asteroids.
The DART mission to knock an asteroid off course just helped make Earth a little bit safer.
Hera is a spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency for its space safety program. Its primary mission objective is to study the Didymos binary asteroid system that was impacted four years earlier by the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft and contribute to validation of the kinetic impact method to deviate a near-Earth asteroid from a colliding trajectory with Earth.
Small, rocky debris created when NASA intentionally slammed a spacecraft into an asteroid could create a new meteor shower that may be visible from Earth or Mars.