A school teacher and his students have discovered that an asteroid deliberately hit by a Nasa spacecraft is behaving in a weird way.

Asteroid behaving unexpectedly after Nasa’s deliberate Dart crash::A school teacher and his students have discovered that an asteroid deliberately hit by a Nasa spacecraft is behaving in a weird way.

  • LemmyFeed@lemmy.worldEnglish
    634·
    1 year ago

    So did NASA not track the asteroid for the last year? Like they just crash a rocket into it and call it good right away? No follow up or deeper analysis? You’d think they would want to monitor it for any weird or unexpected behavior but instead they find out from a high school teacher?

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      652·
      1 year ago

      People still think tachyons neutrinos move faster than light because a professional laboratory gathered data incorrectly one time… I’m not saying these high schoolers messed up their data collection, but it seems more likely than them discovering a new physical phenomenon

      • Skanceca@feddit.deEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        But tachyons are by definitions just “hypothetical particles moving faster than light”. Meaning if they exist, of course they move faster than light. I don’t know which lab your talking about, but people are absolutely right to think that tachyons are faster than light (if they believe tachyons to exist, which of course never has been proven).

        Maybe you have the wrong word here and that people think that neutrinos can move faster than light, since there was a false measurement in CERN? But that one has been reported and updated already.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
          15·
          1 year ago

          Fun fact: particles that move slower than light (i.e. all known particles with mass) are called tardyons.

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      The teams behind the DART mission are tracking it, and will continue to track it into the future. There is even a new mission set to launch to send another craft to the asteroid to gather more information. So, yeah lots of follow up to come over the next year. It is just far more likely that they don’t really have much to say ATM aside from well, that is not acting as predicted, we need more evidence/data to figure out what exactly is going on. Which is what this students paper basically concluded.

      https://phys.org/news/2023-09-dart-impact.html gives a far better overview of the situation than the BBC article linked above.

    • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      127·
      1 year ago

      NASA is run by the federal government. It would make sense that they wouldn’t report something like that, at least at this time, in order to avoid an overreaction by the public.