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Since DART crashed into Dimorphos, changing its orbit around Didymos rather than its orbit around the sun, isn’t there almost no cause for concern because Didym
by pageandrew 4y ago
Since DART crashed into Dimorphos, changing its orbit around Didymos rather than its orbit around the sun, isn’t there almost no cause for concern because Didymos is still on the same non-intersecting orbit around the sun? Is the concern that Dimorphos’s slightly different orbit could pull Didymos slightly off course in its orbit around the sun, thereby causing it to potentially intersect with Earth at some point in the future, where it wouldn’t have prior to DART.
Can we quantify how much Dimorphos’s new orbit has affected Didymos’s orbit? Is that calculable?