Boulder storm ‘as deadly as Hiroshima’ accidentally unleashed by NASA during test to alter an asteroid’s orbit

A boulder swarm “as deadly as Hiroshima” was accidentally released by NASA during its first planetary defense mission last year.

Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, have identified 37 boulders up to 22 feet wide that scattered from the surface of the moonlet Dimorphos after a spacecraft crashed into it.

The mission, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), aimed to push the moonlet out of orbit in the event of an asteroid flying toward Earth.

While the test was a success, it had unintended consequences: smaller rocks flying into space can cause their own problems,” the team shared in a press release.

Even a boulder 4.5 meters high hitting the earth would provide as much energy as the atomic bomb that fell on the Japanese city during World War II.

The team compared the swarm of space rocks to a “cloud of shrapnel expanding from a hand grenade” floating through space at 13,000 miles per hour.

While none of the debris is on a collision course with Earth, scientists are fed up that a storm of boulders resulting from a future deflection of an asteroid could hit our planet at the same speed at which the asteroid traveled — fast enough to cause massive damage to to aim.

NASA launched its DART in 2022 to knock Dimorphos out of orbit and orbit its parent asteroid Didymos.

On Sept. 26, the world watched as DART rocketed toward Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour, changing its orbit from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes after impact.

Ultimately considered a success, DART is now being touted as a way to protect our planet from a catastrophic asteroid impact.

A new study led by UCLA astronomer David Jewitt said, “Because those large boulders actually share the velocity of the targeted asteroid, they are capable of doing their own damage.”

DART spacecraft collided with 560-foot asteroid about 6.7 million miles from Earth

NASA launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in 2022 to deorbit Dimorphos and orbit its parent asteroid Didymos

Jewitt said that given the high speed of a typical impact, a boulder 15 feet high hitting Earth would provide as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Dimorphos never posed a threat to Earth, but was chosen by NASA as a test target because it is six million miles from our planet.

This makes the moonlet close enough to be interesting, but far enough away to have no implications in case of unintended consequences like what UCLA found.

The team analyzed images captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in December 2022 and found that 37 boulders had been released from the surface of Dimorphos.

The research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Lettersfound that the rocks had probably been knocked off the surface by the shock of the impact.

A close-up image from DART that lasted just two seconds before impact shows a similar number of boulders on the asteroid’s surface — of similar size and shape — to those imaged by the Hubble telescope.

Dimorphos never posed a threat to Earth, but was chosen by NASA as a test target because it is ten million kilometers from our planet

Dimorphos was strewn with boulders (Atabaque) before being pushed out of its orbit. These rocks measure up to 22 feet across

The boulders the scientists studied are among the faintest objects ever observed in the solar system and can be seen in great detail thanks to the powerful Hubble telescope.

“If we track the boulders in future Hubble observations, we may have enough data to pinpoint the boulders’ precise trajectories,” Jewitt said.

“And then we’ll see which directions they launched from the surface and find out exactly how they ejected.”

The team believes the boulders were flung from the impact site by seismic shaking or launched from the surface.