The orbit time is accurate to within plus or minus two minutes, she said. Asteroid 2022 EB5 was too small to pose a hazard to Earth, but its discovery marks the fifth time that any asteroid has been observed before. A TV screen at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., captures the last images from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) as it smashes into the asteroid Dimorphos on Monday. (Image credit: SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, STScI, Jian-Yang Li. NASA initially predicted the orbit would be shortened by somewhere around 10 minutes, but estimates ranged from only a few minutes to "several tens of minutes," Glaze said, putting the 32-minute change in the upper range. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the dust plume generated by NASAs DART probe smashing into the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022. Planetary radar facilities in California and West Virginia were also used to measure orbit times. Visibility from Earth isn't great, so they were essentially looking at how often they saw "dips in brightness" from the area, according to Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a swarm of boulders around the asteroid Dimorphos, which NASA’s DART spacecraft intentionally hit last fall. Observers measured the time of the orbit by looking through telescopes in Chile and South Africa at the timing of when one asteroid eclipsed the other. Microseconds later, the main body of the spacecraft collided with the rocky surface next to the boulder and the US330-million DART shattered to bits. What pushed it closer was a combination of the kinetic force of the impact as well as the ejecta - dust and rock - that was blown off the asteroid's surface when the spacecraft hit. The American space agencys Dart probe has smashed into an asteroid, destroying itself in the process. The time was shortened by pushing Dimorphos, which has a diameter of about 525 feet, into a slightly closer orbit around Didymos. In 2022, the idea is to launch a 600-kilogramme (1,300-pound) NASA spacecraft at Didymos, an asteroid. "For the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body," said Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA. (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment). Asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA's DART spacecraft.
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