Haleakala telescopes to help track asteroid after test collision | News, Sports, Jobs

An illustration depicts NASA’s DART spacecraft prior to its impact with the asteroid Dimorphos. NASA sent the school bus-sized spacecraft head-on into the non-threatening asteroid in hopes of testing their ability to deflect asteroids and other objects threatening Earth. Following the impact, University of Hawaii astronomers on Haleakala and Maunakea will help track and collect data on the asteroid’s path throughout the next couple of months. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL illustration

Using a state-of-the-art asteroid alert system, local astronomers helped capture and study the historic moment that a school bus-sized spacecraft purposely crashed head-on into a non-threatening asteroid earlier this week.

NASA’s planetary defense test, dubbed “Double Asteroid Redirection Test,” or DART, was geared toward discovering whether officials on Earth could successfully derail a dangerous asteroid heading toward the planet.

“The Earth has been hit by big asteroids in the past, and with all likelihood will be hit by something big again,” J.D. Armstrong, an outreach astronomer on Maui with the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, said in a UH news release. “When we find one coming our way, we want to know what to do. We want to know how to change the path of the asteroid so that it will not hit us. It could be that important.”

Armstrong is also the director of the Hawaii Student/Teacher Astronomy Research, or HI Star program, and high school students Wilson Chau, Holden Suzuki and James Ancheta planned to work alongside him on Maui to track the asteroid.

Images taken from Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope show the dust plume from the DART impact. Photo courtesy of UH

The Institute for Astronomy operates the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, also known as ATLAS, a four-telescope system located atop Haleakala and Maunaloa in the northern hemisphere and in South Africa and Chile in the southern hemisphere, according to the news release.

ATLAS’ telescope in South Africa compiled images taken every 40 seconds from the time of impact that show the plume of dust blown off of the small asteroid Dimorphos by the 1,260-pound, box-shaped DART spacecraft during Monday’s test.

“The ATLAS telescope system was well positioned to observe the impact from Earth, and we were fortunate to have excellent weather at the ATLAS telescope at Sutherland, South Africa,” said Larry Denneau, an ATLAS co-principal investigator and an astronomer with the Institute for Astronomy.

“Our robotic operation and automatic data processing were able to produce measurements minutes after each observation, giving scientists immediate feedback about the observable effects of the impact.”

Astronomers Richard Wainscoat of the Institute for Astronomy and Robert Weryk of the University of Western Ontario also obtained images of the dust plume using the world-class optical Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Maunakea about 13 hours after the impact.

“The extent and structure of the dust plume surprised me,” said Weryk. “I was expecting it to be on a much smaller scale.”

Throughout the next couple of months, astronomers with the Institute for Astronomy will work with students to study Dimorphos’ orbit using the UH88 telescope on Maunakea and the Faulkes North telescope on Haleakala, which is one of a number of observatories that are part of the Las Cumbres telescope network.

Haleakala also hosts other facilities that aid in planetary defense, such as UH’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope, which helps find larger near-Earth objects that could pose a threat to the planet, according to the news release. In 2017, for example, Pan-STARRS discovered the mysterious interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, the first of its kind spotted in the solar system.

After Pan-STARRS identifies an object that may pass close by, telescopes on Maunakea and elsewhere around the world stop and track the object to determine if it is a possible threat to Earth.

ATLAS, meanwhile, can provide one day’s warning for a 20-meter-diameter asteroid (about 65.6 feet) that is capable of city-level destruction. Since larger asteroids can be detected farther away, ATLAS can provide up to three weeks’ warning for a 100-meter (328 feet) asteroid, capable of wide regional devastation.

“The DART mission struck the little moon of Didymos named Dimorphos hard enough to reduce its orbital period from 12 hours by about five minutes,” said John Tonry, a professor with the Institute for Astronomy and ATLAS principal investigator. “Therefore the eclipses we can observe from Earth will occur earlier and earlier, and after a week or two we will have a very good measurement of how much Dimorphos recoiled after being struck by DART.

“Given this new information, it will be possible to plan a mission to divert a dangerous asteroid: how early must it be struck, how massive must the spacecraft be, how fast must it be traveling.”

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