Comment on Planetary defense test deflected an asteroid but unleashed a boulder swarm
freecandy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Pretty cool they were able to measure the change in velocity of an object 6 million miles away with millmeter/second resolution. Not cool that it only slowed down a few mm/second though
Thorndike@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Actually, a few mm/sec is quite a lot. That could easily be more than enough to deflect an asteroid from hitting earth. That few mm/sec will accumulate over the time it takes the asteroid to travel six million miles.
freecandy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well you would need the vector to predict that, not just the speed, but pretty cool nonetheless