NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission – which aimed to knock the small moon Dimorphos out of its orbit, a 160-meter-diameter asteroid accompanying Didymos – was a great success. But it has now been revealed that a swarm of rocks “as deadly as Hiroshima” was accidentally released during the action.

Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (USA), identified 37 boulders up to 6.7 meters wide scattered across the surface of Dimorphos after a spaceship crashed into it.

While the trial was successful, it had unintended consequences:Smaller rocks flying into space can cause their own problemsshared the team in a press release.

Even a rock 15 feet high that could hit the Earth would provide as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.

The team compared the swarm of space rocks to a “shrapnel cloud expanding from a hand grenaderising through space at nearly 13,000 miles per hour, details Daily mail.

Although none of the debris is on a collision course with Earth, scientists are concerned that a rock storm resulting from a future deflection of an asteroid could hit our planet at the same speed at which the asteroid was travelingfast enough to deal massive damage.

A new study led by UCLA astronomer David Jewitt said, “Because those big rocks actually share the speed of the target asteroid, they are capable of doing their own damage.”

The astronomer said that given the high speed of a typical impact, a 15-foot (4.5 m) rock hitting the Earth would provide as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Dimorphos never posed a threat to Earth, but NASA chose it as a test target because it is nearly 6 million miles from our planet.

This makes the small moon close enough to be interesting, but far enough away to have no implications in the case of the kind of unintended consequences UCLA found.

The team analyzed images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in December 2022 and found that 37 rocks had been released from the surface of Dimorphos.

The research, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that the rocks were likely torn from the surface by the shock of the impact.