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NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world’s first test of a planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth.

Humanity’s first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations center outside Washington, DC, 10 months after DART was launched.

The livestream showed images taken by DART’s camera as the cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, no bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, streaked into the asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, at 7:14 pm EDT (23:14 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.

The $330 million (roughly Rs. 2,683 crore) mission, some seven years in development, was devised to determine if a spacecraft is capable of changing the trajectory of an asteroid through sheer kinetic force, nudging it off course just enough to keep Earth out of harm’s way.

Whether the experiment succeeded beyond accomplishing its intended impact will not be known until further ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid next month. But NASA officials hailed the immediate outcome of Monday’s test, saying the spacecraft achieved its purpose.

“NASA works for the benefit of humanity, so for us it’s the ultimate fulfillment of our mission to do something like this – a technology demonstration that, who knows, some day could save our home,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, a retired astronaut, said minutes after the impact.

DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA’s flight directors, with control handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey.

Monday evening’s bullseye impact was monitored in near real time from the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Cheers erupted from the control room as second-by-second images of the target asteroid, captured by DART’s onboard camera, grew larger and ultimately filled the TV screen of NASA’s live webcast just before the signal was lost, confirming the spacecraft had crashed into Dimorphos.

DART’s celestial target was an oblong asteroid “moonlet” about 560 feet (170 meters) in diameter that orbits a parent asteroid five times larger called Didymos as part of a binary pair with the same name, the Greek word for twin.

Neither object presents any actual threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test could not create a new hazard by mistake.

Dimorphos and Didymos are both tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species including the dinosaurs.

Smaller asteroids are far more common and present a greater theoretical concern in the near term, making the Didymos pair suitable test subjects for their size, according to NASA scientists and planetary defense experts. A Dimorphos-sized asteroid, while not capable of posing a planet-wide threat, could level a major city with a direct hit.

Also, the two asteroids’ relative proximity to Earth and dual configuration make them ideal for the first proof-of-concept mission of DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

Robotic suicide mission

The mission represented a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft had to crash to succeed. DART flew directly into Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph), creating the force scientists hope will be enough to shift its orbital track closer to the parent asteroid.

APL engineers said the spacecraft was presumably smashed to bits and left a small impact crater in the boulder-strewn surface of the asteroid.

The DART team said it expects to shorten the orbital path of Dimorphos by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success, proving the exercise as a viable technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth – if one were ever discovered.

A nudge to an asteroid millions of miles away years in advance could be sufficient to safely reroute it.

Earlier calculations of the starting location and orbital period of Dimorphos were made during a six-day observation period in July and will be compared with post-impact measurements made in October to determine whether the asteroid budged and by how much.

Monday’s test also was observed by a camera mounted on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART days in advance, as well as by ground-based observatories and the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, but images from those were not immediately available.

DART is the latest of several NASA missions in recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system’s formation more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Last year, NASA launched a probe on a voyage to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth with a sample collected in October 2020 from the asteroid Bennu.

The Dimorphos moonlet is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA. Although none are known to pose a foreseeable hazard to humankind, NASA estimates that many more asteroids remain undetected in the near-Earth vicinity.

© Thomson Reuters 2022


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A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

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A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature.

A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b’s Fiery Orbit

As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen.

Magnetic Chaos: Planet Triggering Star’s Explosions

Stars are burning plasma, gigantic balls with charged particles or ions that move on their surface to form strong magnetic fields. Since the magnetic fields cannot cross each other, sometimes these field knots suddenly snap to launch flares of radiation known as solar flares, which are often accompanied by coronal mass ejections, also known as surface plasma.

As many planets have a magnetic field, scientists have long wondered whether the planets, having close orbits near their stars, might disturb these strong magnetic fields and trigger the explosions. For years, scientists have observed whether the planets can influence the magnetic behaviour of their host stars, especially the ones that are close to their orbits.

A New Era of Star-Planet Relationship Studies

A planet with a strong magnetic field orbits around a star which has a delicate magnetic field, then it might be bombarded with solar radiation. These interactions helps int he study of star and planet bond and further the evolution of atmospher and magnetic field.

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Webb Telescope Spots Possible Jellyfish Galaxy 12 Billion Light-Years Away

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Webb Telescope Spots Possible Jellyfish Galaxy 12 Billion Light-Years Away

Astronomers have discovered a new “jellyfish” galaxy about 12 billion light-years away using the James Webb Space Telescope. It appears to have tentacle-like streams of gas and stars trailing off one side, a signature feature of jellyfish galaxies. These galaxies develop such trails via ram pressure stripping as they move through dense cluster environments, triggering star formation in the stripped gas. The find was made by Ian Roberts of Waterloo University, and details are described in a preprint on arXiv. More analysis is needed to confirm the classification, but early signs strongly suggest this object is indeed a jellyfish galaxy.

What Are Jellyfish Galaxies?

According to NASA, jellyfish galaxies are so named because of the long, trailing streams of gas and young stars that extend from one side of the galaxy. This phenomenon occurs when a galaxy moves rapidly through the hot, dense gas in a cluster, and ram pressure strips material away. The stripped gas forms a wake behind the galaxy, and this wake often lights up with bursts of new star formation. At the same time, the process can deprive the galaxy’s core of gas, potentially slowing star formation in the galaxy’s center.

Because the jellyfish stage is short-lived on cosmic timescales, astronomers rarely catch galaxies in this act. Studying jellyfish galaxies gives scientists insight into how dense environments affect galaxy evolution and star formation.

Discovery and Future Research

The researchers caution that the galaxy’s apparent “tentacles” may partly be an artifact of the imaging method. If confirmed, this object (COSMOS2020-635829) would be the most distant known jellyfish galaxy, offering a rare glimpse of how ram pressure stripping and cluster-driven quenching operated in the early cosmos. As the study authors note, finding a jellyfish at z>1 reinforces the idea that these environmental effects were already at work near the peak of cosmic star formation.

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Mars Dust Devils May Spark Lightning, Might Pose Risks to Rovers: Study

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Mars Dust Devils May Spark Lightning, Might Pose Risks to Rovers: Study

Dust devils on Mars – swirling columns of dust and air that often scour the Red Planet’s surface – may be crackling with electricity, a new computer-modeling study suggests. Researchers led by Varun Sheel simulated how Mars’s dry atmosphere and frictional dust collisions charge up grains inside a vortex. They found these fields could grow so strong that brief lightning-like discharges might occur. This electrification is a concern for surface missions, since charged dust could cling to rover wheels, solar panels and antennas, blocking sunlight and interfering with communications.

Formation and Features of Martian Dust Devils

According to the study, dust devils form when the Sun heats Mars’s surface, causing warm air to rise and spin into vortices. Colder air rushes inward along the ground, stretching the rising column upward and whipping dust high into the sky. Because Mars has lower gravity and a thinner atmosphere than Earth, its dust devils can tower much higher, three times larger than storms on Earth. NASA’s Viking mission first detected Martian dust devils; later rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance have filmed them sweeping across the dusty plains. These whirlwinds clean off solar panels – as happened with Spirit in 2005 – but more often they stir up fine dust that can coat instruments.

Electrification and Risks to Rovers

Dust grains in Martian whirlwinds can pick up charge through collisions (a triboelectric effect). Sheel’s models predict that this charge separation can create strong electric fields inside a dust devil. These fields could even exceed Mars’s atmospheric breakdown threshold (around 25 kV/m), enough to spark lightning in the vortex. NASA’s Perseverance rover recorded what appears to be a small triboelectric discharge when a dust devil passed overhead.

Even without lightning, any static buildup is problematic. As planetary scientist Yoav Yair notes, “Electrified dust will adhere to conducting surfaces such as wheels, solar panels and antennas,” potentially reducing sunlight reaching panels and jamming communications. Rovers may need new design features or procedures to handle this unusual Martian weather.

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