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For the orbital period, change and theyre, both completely consistent and supporting this result that weve heard that this 32 minute orbital period change. If I could have the first animation, please, the first data set and method used by the dart team uses optical telescopes here on the earth, and so these optical telescopes here on the earth, can never actually tell the difference between dittobos and dimorphose. As it looks to these telescopes, this asteroid system is always just a single point of light, but that single point of light changes in brightness with time as seen by these telescopes, because sometimes the little asteroid dimorphos passes in front of the larger asteroid, dynamos and theres. A little bit of a shadow but then other times it actually passes right into dinamosas Shadow. This is a dimorphous eclipse, and so you can see from these Eclipse events that the telescopes see a decrease in the overall brightness of this asteroid system. Every time that this happens and then you can also see that these Eclipse timings are very much related to the orbital period of dynamos around amorphose. So by measuring, when these eclipse happen, you can determine what that orbital period is so ever since uh the event on September 26th, two weeks ago, these telescopes have been observing this system nightly and thats. What you see going across here on this graph on the top just this nightly telescopic data night after night after night after knife, all added up there theres, actually four different telescopes on the earth that have contributed to making this graph so far that youre, looking at In this result that were presenting today is the lascapanas observatory in Chile.
The Los cucumbers Observatory, Global telescope network, with facilities both in South Africa and in Chile and the Danish telescope in Chile and all four of their data have excellent agreement and are all just overlaying on top of each other right here. Additionally, the dart team has two independent research groups that have looked at analyzing this data separately and they have come to exactly the same conclusion. So this is also then showing two examples of this much larger data set blown up to so you can see the actual data on September 29th and on October 4th, and what you see very clearly in that data. Is these dips in brightness that we were just talking about with that animation, and these dips in brightness were confirmed by these two independent research groups and they are consistent and indicate that the orbital period of dimorphos around dynamos currently is 11 hours and 23 minutes? What you can also see here is that it is not consistent with being 11 hours and 55 minutes as it was prior to darts impact event, and this is a very strong conclusion of evidence. The team is very confident in of this 32 minute orbital period. Change. Now the second data set that was used independently is planetary radar and the planetary radar facilities used were the Goldstone observatory in California and the green Bank observatory in West Virginia whats nice about planetary radar is that, in contrast to the opital telescopes, you can actually distinctly Get signal from both dimorphos and dinamos directly, and this is an important distinction, so the Goldstone observatory, in particular, has been tracking the position of dimorphos regularly every night for the last two weeks roughly and from those they have also been tracking that this is an 11 Hour and 23 minute period currently for dimorphos around dynamos, with a 32 minute orbital period change.
If I can have the last graphic for me please here. Additionally, on October 4th and October 9th, these radar facilities were able to get some direct images of the dynamos and dimorphos system. Here you see didimos, but also directly in the image. You can also get signal from dimorphos and so were directly Imaging both of these asteroids and getting their positions relative to each other, and the position of dimorphos is consistent with 11 hours and 23 minutes for its orbital period, and it is not consistent with being what The orbital period was prior to the dart impact, which was 11 hours and 55 minutes, and so this is, and just another example of these two independent methods, all giving you this same answer. So this is a very exciting and promising result for planetary defense. To have this orbital period change of 32 minutes its within the range of the models that have been studied, but its also definitely indicating that youre getting an enhanced deflection due to the amount of ejecta that Rocky material thats being thrown off when darts Collision happened. I think its also, though important, to put this into perspective of a kinetic impactor technique. If you wanted to use this in the future, potentially to deflect an asteroid. This is a four percent change in the orbital period of dimorphos around didimos, and it just gave it a small nudge. But if you wanted to do this in the future, potentially it could potentially work, but youd want to do it years in advance.
Warning time is really key here in order to enable this sort of asteroid deflection to potentially be used in the future, and it is part of a much larger planetary defense strategy. The first one shows the last second before the impact, and you can see the the change basically a little change in in the Little Dot, which is the most showing the ejection of the of the material. But, of course, a second video we prepared shows what actually happened during this approaching of the molar cost, the flight time and the Turning of the the southern light and and getting far away. So we, what you can see in the second video is actually the approaching from 700 kilometers of distance. Then the flybys will went very close up to 59 kilometers from the from the morphers and then you can see um while were getting more far away of about 300 kilometers. So I believe what youre seeing here is really really fantastic. I remember the night when, from the control sensor um at the argotech current appliances, the our prime contractor, we started looking at those images. We we couldnt believe our eyes that actually we made it and we made it thanks to this fantastic collaboration with the with Colleen from NASA, and we are really really proud of that.
