November 8, 2026
Leonid Yelenin, a researcher at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, confirmed that the success achieved by NASA’s “DART” spacecraft in changing the orbit of the “Dimorphos” asteroid does not mean completely solving the problem of protecting Earth from dangerous celestial bodies.
Yelenin explained that the collision experiment, which took place on September 26, 2022, represented a successful natural scientific experiment, but it does not constitute a sufficient means to protect the planet, pointing out that humanity currently lacks the energy necessary to carry out collision operations that provide comprehensive protection.
During the experiment, the “DART” spacecraft, which weighs about 600 kilograms, collided with the asteroid “Dimorphos” (which has a diameter of about 150 meters) at a speed of 6.1 kilometers per second. The collision resulted in a change in the speed of the asteroid, which led to a reduction in the period of its rotation around the Earth by 33 minutes, to become 11 hours and 22 minutes instead of 11 hours and 55 minutes, exceeding the initial calculations that estimated the change at only about 10 minutes.
This experiment is the first of its kind to monitor an artificial change in the orbit of a natural celestial body, as the data derived from optical observations were verified through radar measurements using ground-based telescopes.
Despite the success of the experiment, the actual change in Dimorphos’ orbital speed did not exceed 2.7 mm per second, and the diameter of its orbit decreased by less than 100 meters compared to its original value of about 2.4 kilometers. For comparison, the average speed of near-Earth asteroids is about 20 kilometers per second, which is about 6.7 million times greater than the recorded change in asteroid speed.
