“We will be finding the exact impact site to really understand what kind of crater did we make, and of course, the ground-based observers are busy as we speak,” she said, adding that her team will be looking at data over the course of the next days and weeks to find out what really happened.Įlena Adams, the DART mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory speaks at the DART news conference on Monday. “We will spend the next months and years doing analysis of course our job has just started but it really looks just amazing,” she said at a news conference on Monday.ĭimorphos is covered in boulders and Ernst said she suspects it is a “loosely consolidated” rubble pile, similar to some of the other small asteroids they have seen. Images from the spacecraft’s onboard imager were humanity’s first look at the asteroid. It’s so cute,” said Carolyn Ernst, the DART DRACO instrument scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, describing the asteroid, Dimorphos. “It’s like adorable - it’s this little moon. (NASA)Īs the images rolled in from the DART mission as it sped toward an asteroid, one scientist could not take her eyes off the target. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.A view of Dimorphos seconds before the DART spacecraft hit the asteroid on Monday. JPL hosts the office for Near-Earth Object orbit analysis for NASA's Near Earth Object Observations Program of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. There are no known credible impact threats to date - only the continuous and harmless infall of meteoroids, tiny asteroids that burn up in the atmosphere. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes the physical nature of a subset of them, and predicts their paths to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet. NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing 30 million miles of Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. "In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century." "Again, there is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth," said Chodas. And just this year, asteroids 2004 BL YB35 were said to be on dangerous near-Earth trajectories, but their flybys of our planet in January and March went without incident - just as NASA said they would. 21, 2012, insisting the world would end with a large asteroid impact. Then there were Internet assertions surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar on Dec. In 2011 there were rumors about the so-called "doomsday" comet Elenin, which never posed any danger of harming Earth and broke up into a stream of small debris out in space. It seems to be a perennial favorite of the World Wide Web. "If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now," he stated.Īnother thing Chodas and his team do know - this isn't the first time a wild, unsubstantiated claim of a celestial object about to impact Earth has been made, and unfortunately, it probably won't be the last. If there were any observations on anything headed our way, Chodas and his colleagues would know about it. The Near-Earth Object office at JPL is a key group involved with the international collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could do harm to our planet and predicting their paths through space for the foreseeable future. All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years. In fact, NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program says there have been no asteroids or comets observed that would impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. "There is no scientific basis - not one shred of evidence - that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. That's the rumor that has gone viral - now here are the facts. On one of those dates, as rumors go, there will be an impact - "evidently" near Puerto Rico - causing wanton destruction to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States and Mexico, as well as Central and South America.
Numerous recent blogs and web postings are erroneously claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between Sept.
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