It's going to take some time to figure out," said Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. We've never witnessed an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real time, and it's really surprising. "The DART impact happened in a binary asteroid system. This was over a volume of space much larger than could be recorded by the LICIACube cubesat, which flew past the binary asteroid minutes after DART's impact. The Hubble movie offers invaluable new clues into how the debris was dispersed into a complex pattern in the days following the impact. Smashing head on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour, the DART impactor blasted over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off of the asteroid. ![]() Hubble's time-lapse movie of the aftermath of DART's collision reveals surprising and remarkable, hour-by-hour changes as dust and chunks of debris were flung into space. The DART experiment also provided fresh insights into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early solar system. Though neither Didymos nor Dimorphos poses any threat to Earth, data from the mission will help inform researchers how to potentially divert an asteroid's path away from Earth, if ever necessary. The primary objective of DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was to test our ability to alter the asteroid's trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. Like a sports photographer at an auto-racing event, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022. Knowing how to steer a rogue asteroid away from a catastrophic collision with Earth might save humanity someday. The dust blew off the asteroid into a cone shape, got twisted-up along the asteroid's orbit about its companion, and was then blown into a comet-like tail. They were surprised, delighted, and somewhat mystified by the results. It fired off a series of snapshots over several days capturing the outflow of tons of dusty debris from the 13,000-miles-per-hour impact. Hubble had a ringside seat to the demolition derby. On September 26, 2022, Dimorphos was hit with the DART spacecraft, which was half the weight of a small car. Called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), the target was a binary asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos. Perhaps, for the first time in the history of the universe, an intelligent planetary species sought ways to avoid its own potential extinction by threats from outer space (something the dinosaurs, who were wiped out 65 million years ago by a rogue asteroid, never evolved to accomplish). This experiment was to test a potential technique to someday deflect an asteroid on a collision course to Earth. In 2022 NASA embarked on a bold experiment to see if they could change an asteroid's velocity by smacking it with a ballistic probe – kind of like hitting it with a hammer. Four Successful Women Behind the Hubble Space Telescope's Achievements.Characterizing Planets Around Other Stars.Measuring the Universe's Expansion Rate. ![]() Follow us on Twitter Spacedotcom and on Facebook. The mission will give scientists a better look at the impact crater itself after the dust has settled, as well as at the asteroids' natural states.Įmail Meghan Bartels at or follow her on Twitter meghanbartels. ![]() Hera will arrive in 2026 and, unlike DART, will stay in the neighborhood, exploring both Dimorphos and Didymos. The European Space Agency will launch Hera, a follow-up mission, in 2024. However, the cubesat also turned its two cameras to the unscarred side of Dimorphos, giving scientists additional data about the space rock.Īnd scientists have another opportunity to see Dimorphos in detail, this time for much longer. LICIACube flew past the impact site just three minutes after the collision, photographing the cloud of debris that DART's abrupt arrival flung into space. Over the coming days, scientists will be receiving more images of Dimorphos, ones snapped by the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging Asteroids ( LICIACube), a tiny spacecraft that rode along with DART until earlier this month. The greatest asteroid missions of all time! James Webb, Hubble space telescopes will try to watch DART asteroid impact 8 ways to stop an asteroid: Nuclear weapons, paint and Bruce Willis
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