By Dean Murray via SWNS
Scientists may have inadvertently started a game of space billiards – by smashing boulders towards Mars.
In September, 2022, NASA deliberately flew the 1,200-pound DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos.
The mission successfully demonstrated the ability to change the course of an asteroid, a technique that could be employed if any threatened Earth.
However, striking the space rock at 13,000 miles per hour saw the DART impactor blast over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off the asteroid.
These included 37 boulders with a size of 4 to 7 meters which were ejected from the system during the impact.
A new study charting the course of these boulders suggest they will not hit Earth, but several may crash into the Martian surface causing craters of up to 300 meters.
A yet-to-be peer reviewed paper says: “Numerical simulations show that all the boulders of the swarm will cross the orbit of Mars multiple times in the future 20 (thousand years).
“The simulated swarm is statistically representative of the set of 37 actual boulders recently discovered by using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope that were ejected during the impact of the DART spacecraft on Dimorphos.
“Therefore, due to the orbit crossings happening in the long-term evolution, it is possible that some of the boulders will impact Mars in the future.
The study also assessed what effect a boulder would have if it did strike Mars, especially as “the Martian atmosphere is too thin to slow it down significantly”.
The researchers wrote: “For this reason, in our case, a small, simple impact crater of about 200-300 m (656-984 feet) in diameter will be generated.”
The researchers noted the closest approach to Earth could happen in about 2,500 years. However, any boulder would “not fall below 0.02 au”, with one AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
The yet-to-be peer reviewed paper is published on pre-print server arXiv. It is co-authored by Marco Fenucci, a near-Earth object dynamicist at the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Objects Coordination Centre.
