EAST LANSING, Mich. — The inspiration behind Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Don't Look Up, planetary scientist and Michigan State University professor Seth Jacobson, recently contributed to a research paper published in Nature, a multidisciplinary science journal.
The MSU scientist worked with NASA to divert space rocks and other debris from it's initial path, something that could become useful in the future.
The Double Asteroid Redirect Test, referred to as DART, established how NASA can successfully knock a near-earth asteroid off of its trajectory.
“The best part of this story is the astronomy students at the MSU Observatory,” says Jacobson. “The undergrads are driving research at the observatory. They’re out there observing all night. They finish their classes, have dinner, stay up until 5 o’clock in the morning at the observatory and still make their classes the next day.”
While data collected by the MSU observatory wasn't used in the published research paper, a team of undergraduate students are currently working on a new paper that will highlight their findings.
The premise behind DART is that if an asteroid is on a path towards earth, a low-cost, unmanned spacecraft would be able to deflect the asteroid away from the planet.
To test this theory, NASA sent a DART impactor spacecraft to collide with an asteroid named Dimorphos. Traveling at 13,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft collided with the asteroid roughly 7 million miles away from earth. Astronomers kept an eye on Dimorphos for several weeks following the collision in order to learn how much DART had altered the course of the asteroid.
To learn more about the MSU Observatory and Seth Jacobson's work with undergraduate students, visit MSU's website.
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