Michigan State professors, students take part in asteroid deflection test
EAST LANSING — Scientists may be one step closer to being able to protect Earth from objects on a collision course, and Michigan State University says its students and faculty are playing a role in making that happen.
Seth Jacobson, an MSU assistant professor and planetary scientist, recently helped NASA confirm that its Double Asteroid Redirect Test successfully diverted an asteroid from its initial path. Undergraduate students who belong to the MSU Observatory Research Program, including senior Emma Dugan, also are working on a variety of projects, including DART, as part of their academic careers.
In the DART test, NASA sent an Impactor spacecraft barreling into an asteroid named Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos, at 13,000 mph. The collision was roughly 7 million miles away from Earth, which is close enough to see with telescopes like the one at the MSU Observatory.
“The James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble both looked at the asteroid before and after impact, but it’s really expensive to do that,” Dugan said. At MSU, Dugan and her MORP colleagues could watch the asteroid every clear night for a month.
Jacobson recently contributed to a paper published in the journal "Nature" that’s part of the first wave of analysis showing how NASA successfully knocked a near-Earth asteroid off its initial path, MSU said in a press release.
“The best part of this story is the astronomy students at the MSU Observatory,” said Jacobson, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “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.”
The MSU Observatory has a decades-long history of providing undergraduates hands-on research experience and more than a dozen took part in watching the DART test and compiling data. Although MORP’s data wasn’t included in the first round of publications detailing the asteroid deflection, the team has new papers in the works, Jacobson said.
Dugan, a student in MSU's Department of Physics and Astronomy, works with Joey Rodriguez, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Science who also oversees undergraduate research at the observatory. As part of Rodriguez's team, Dugan studies exoplanets, but she took part in work that was part of DART.
“The DART mission was happening at the perfect time,” Dugan said. “After I heard Seth’s talk, we realized the observatory would be capable of seeing the asteroid. From there, we wanted to find out if we could get any useful data.
“It was really hard to know what to expect going into this,” Dugan said. “It wasn’t like anything we had observed before.”
In addition to Dugan, about 15 other undergraduates, and former postdoctoral researcher Kirill Sokolovsky, who is now with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, took part in the tracking effort.
“The observatory completely changed the track I was on,” Dugan said. “In a very good way.”
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Michigan State professors, students work with NASA on collision test
