Rest assured, Didymos and Didymoon are not going to crash on Earth. On the other hand, they are the subject of a project aimed at diverting them. But to better understand their size, the European Space Agency (ESA) offers us some scale shots.
Asteroids sometimes take us by surprise. In July 2019 for example, an object of 100 meters wide passed about 70,000 km from Earth. The problem is that it had only been spotted a few days earlier by the Brazilian observatory SONEAR. This is why the threat posed by asteroids to our planet is taken very seriously by astronomers. After all, one of them was still responsible for one of the greatest extinctions the Earth has ever seen.
In an attempt to track and list them, several instruments have been deployed. Among them are the Pan-STARRS, ATLAS, or the above-named SONEAR telescopes. Several thousand asteroids have been probed so far, but we are not immune to running out of them. This is why, in addition to these means of tracking, researchers are now considering the establishment of means of protection . You see…just in case.
In this sense, ESA and NASA are currently collaborating on a mission – the DART program (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) – intended to deviate the asteroid Didymos in 2022 .
Why this item? Because it is accompanied by a small asteroidal moon, nicknamed Didymos B or Didymoon. The idea will be to destabilize this small moon with an impactor and to assess whether its trajectory could have been modified around Didymos. Attacking a single object, the researchers could have done, but the fact that there are two will greatly facilitate the analyses.
“A binary asteroid is the perfect natural laboratory for this test , explained in 2017 Tom Statler, who works on the DART program. The fact that Didymos B is in orbit around Didymos A makes it easier to read the results after impact” .
From a physical point of view, these two objects are also big "but not too much". This is what makes this mission feasible and interesting. Didymos has a diameter of 780 meters , while Didymoon is 160 meters . But these measurements don't tell us much about ourselves. This is why, to better realize the magnitude of this project, ESA recently shared some photos to better represent these two objects.
Note that in the photo depicting Didymos and Didymoon over Paris (above), the two asteroids do not appear on the same plane.
After seeing these images, we take everything same awareness of the danger that these two objects could represent if they were to fall on our planet. “Even though the moon Didymoon is the smaller of the two Didymos asteroid system, this asteroid could destroy an entire city” , warns the ESA.
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