NASA’s Hubble Telescope Captures DART’s Collision With Asteroid Dimorphos

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of pictures of asteroid Dimorphos after it was intentionally struck by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022, according to their statement .

HubbleThis time-lapse movie of DART’s aftermath of the collision shows astonishing, and remarkable, hour-by-hour changes as dust and debris hurled into space, NASA said in their statement,

Smashing head-on into the asteroid at 13,000 mph, the DART impactor blasted away more than 1,000 tons of dust and rock asteroid,

NASA said the Hubble movie provides invaluable new clues as to how the debris was spread out in a complex pattern in the days following the impact.

This was far greater than the volume of space that could be recorded by the LICIACube CubeSat, which passed through the binary asteroid after DART’s impact, he said.

The agency said the primary purpose of DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirect Test, was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos.

Although neither Didymos nor Dimorphos poses any threat EarthThe mission’s data will help inform researchers how to bend an asteroid’s path away from Earth if necessary, the statement said.

The DART experiment also provided new insight into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early Solar system,

“The DART impact occurred in a binary asteroid system. We’ve never seen an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system in real time before, and it’s truly amazing.

“I think it’s fantastic. There’s a lot of stuff going on here. It’s going to take some time to figure it out,” said Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

The study, led by Li along with 63 other DART team members, was published March 1 in the journal Nature.

The movie shows three overlapping stages after the impact: the formation of an ejecta cone, the spiral vortex of debris caught up with the asteroid’s orbit about its companion asteroid, and the tail swept behind the asteroid by the pressure of sunlight. which looks like a windsock. Caught in a breeze, the statement said.

The statement describes that the Hubble movie starts 1.3 hours before the impact.

In this view both Didymos and Dimorphos are within the central bright spot; Even Hubble can’t resolve the two asteroids separately.

The thin, straight spikes jutting out from the center (and seen in later images) are artifacts of Hubble’s optics.

The first after-effect snapshot is from 2 hours after the event.

The debris flew away from the asteroid, moving at more than four miles per hour, fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull, so it did not fall back onto the asteroid, the statement said.

The ejecta forms massive hollow cones with long, fibrous filaments.

The debris pattern entered the second phase approximately 17 hours after impact.

The statement explained that dynamical interactions within the binary system begin to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern.

The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is bound by the gravitational pull of the companion asteroid, Didymos.

“It’s really unique for this particular event,” Lee said. “When I first saw these images, I couldn’t believe these features. I thought maybe the image was smeared or something.” Hubble then captures debris being flung back into the comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on smaller dust particles, the statement said.

It spans a debris train where the lightest particles travel fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery was later complicated when Hubble split the tail in two for a few days, the statement said.

crowd of others Telescope But Earth And in space, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Lucy spacecraft, observed the effects of DART and its consequences.

This Hubble movie is part of a suite of new studies about the DART mission published in the journal Nature.