Testing planetary defenses against asteroids, and building a giant ‘water machine’
Science Magazine Podcast
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What's the Main Test of the Dart Mission?
The reason why we're hitting this what's called a binary asteroid system. Part of the motivation is that it's orbitally locked around the larger body. The other reason is that we can learn more from the light coming off of these spinary asteroid systems. On earth, we see both of these asteroids as a single point of light. But beause they're orbiting one another, when one of the rocks passes in front of the other one, we see that light dip in brightness. And that's how we can figure out things like the orbital frequency and get some estimates on the size of the bodies and the spin of them.
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