In-depth research into the DART collision will continue, as the European Space Agency plans to launch its Hera spacecraft in 2024 to study the scarred face of Dimorphos up close. The DART spacecraft slammed into a harmless space rock to change its orbita tactic that could be used one day to stop a killer asteroid from hitting Earth. Taken together, these results pave the way for "a bright future for planetary defense," Jason Kalirai, the mission area executive for civil space at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which co-manages the DART mission with NASA, said in the statement. While scientists have previously predicted that active asteroids result from collisions, until now the transformation has never been seen in real time. Soon after the impact, the ejected material. 'Now is when the science starts,' Lori Glaze, director of NASAs planetary science division, said after Mondays collision. The team used the Hubble Space Telescope to image the ejecta for 18.5 days, beginning 15 minutes after the impact, according to one of the new studies. The probe, a box that is smaller than a golf cart, lifted off aboard the Falcon 9 at 1:21 a.m. This trail of dusty debris has since been seen stretching into space for thousands of miles, transforming Dimorphos into a little-understood type of asteroid called an "active asteroid" - essentially, a space rock that orbits like an asteroid but sports a tail like a comet, the final paper says. NASAs 1,376-pound probe traveled about 6.8 million miles before crashing into the asteroid, as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. Its sole job: to crash head-on into the center of a distant asteroid. The impact instantly slowed the asteroid's orbital speed by at least 0.1 inch per second (2.7 millimeters per second), thanks to both the momentum of the crashing spacecraft and the enormous plume of dust ejected from the asteroid's surface after the crash. The agency has launched a mission to crash into an asteroid, a test to learn how humans can avoid an extinction-level event. The second study uses two different methods to independently confirm the 33-minute slowdown of Dimorphos' orbit, while the third paper calculates the momentum transferred from the DART spacecraft to the asteroid. What are the largest impact craters on Earth? Why are asteroids and comets such weird shapes? What happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth?
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