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Ever want to play a game of cosmic billiards? That\u2019s commonly how the DART mission was described when it successfully changed the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid last year. If you want an idea of how it works, just Google it and an Easter egg from the search giant will give you a general idea. But DART was more like trying to brute force a billiards break \u2013 there are many other things you can do with a set of asteroids and impactors on the galactic stage. One of the more interesting is to try to force two asteroids together to form a \u201ccontact binary\u201d \u2013 the goal of a mission design put forward by a group of scientists from Cornell in a recent paper in Acta Astronautica.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Colby Merill and his colleagues at Cornell\u2019s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department first explain why such a mission would be a good idea. Contact binaries are defined as a system when two objects are so close together that their surfaces touch. Typically, astronomers think of the objects as a pair of stars, but asteroids can also form contact binaries.<\/p>\n Recent estimates put the total number of contact binaries as high as 30% of all small solar system bodies, including famous ones like Arrokoth and 67P\/Churyumov-Gersasimenko. That means if there are any potentially hazardous asteroids we aren\u2019t yet aware of, there\u2019s a fair chance it\u2019s actually a contact binary.<\/p>\n \n