NASA’s DART mission may lead to Earth’s first human-made meteor shower as space debris heads our way. Launched in November 2021, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission aimed to protect Earth by deflecting a potentially hazardous asteroid. The mission successfully altered the orbit of its target, the asteroid Dimorphos, a moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. By changing Dimorphos’s speed and trajectory, DART demonstrated a potential method for future asteroid defense.
However, the successful mission has led to new concerns. Recent research, using data from the LICIACube spacecraft and NASA supercomputers, tracked around 3 million fragments ejected by the impact. Scientists found that some of these fragments could eventually reach the Earth-Moon system or Mars within a decade. Observations suggest it may take up to 30 years for any fragments to be visible from Earth.
The study indicates that smaller particles, traveling at slower speeds, could hit Earth in about seven years, while faster particles might reach Mars in roughly 13 years. Although these fragments could create visible streaks of light as they burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, they are not expected to pose any danger to life.
Eloy Peña-Asensio, the lead author of the study and an aerospace engineer at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, assured Universe Today that if fragments from Dimorphos do reach Earth, they will be harmless. Instead, their small size and high speed will result in dazzling streaks of light across the sky, casing a meteor shower.