I’m sure they did this whole thing on paper before executing, but why did they need to actually do it?
Normally, I’m all for funding space agencies, but there doesn’t seem like a whole lot of value in doing this. If you know all of variables in concept, you should be able predict that it would work. Right?
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It was less about figuring out if they could hit the asteroid and more to see what would happen to it afterwards.
It is hard to model such an impact when you don’t know exactly what these rocks are made of and how they will behave if you crash an object into one.
The idea is to crash the probe into the asteroid and then to observe it over a period of weeks and months to see how much its orbit changed.
The obvious benefit of that is that if we ever actually need to divert an asteroid from hitting earth, we will have a better idea about how hard we will have to hit it.
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