Greetings to you. I participate in the Wikipedia project to write and edit (as collaboratively as possible); hopefully you do, too. Most often I contribute to the subject of Wales. If you want to get an idea of who I am, click around on this page or take a look at the Userboxes I've gathered and created. Please leave a message on my talk page if you have comments about my contributions or edits. "Gwnewch y pethau bychain mean bywyd"
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects. The target object, Dimorphos, is a 160-meter-long (525-foot) minor-planet moon of the asteroid Didymos. DART was launched on 24 November 2021 and successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 while about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth. The collision shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 32 minutes and was mostly achieved by the momentum transfer associated with the recoil of the ejected debris, which was larger than the impact. This video is a timelapse of DART's final five and a half minutes before impacting Dimorphos, and was compiled from photographs captured by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), the spacecraft's 20-centimeter-aperture (7.9-inch) camera, and transmitted to Earth in real time. The replay is ten times faster than reality, except for the last six images, which are shown at the same rate at which the spacecraft returned them. Both Didymos and Dimorphos are visible at the start of the video, and the final frame shows a patch of Dimorphos's surface 16 meters (51 feet) across. DART's impact occurred during transmission of the final image, resulting in a partial frame.
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