The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately struck by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022, according to their statement.
Hubble’s time-lapse movie of the aftermath of the DART collision reveals surprising and remarkable changes from hour to hour in how dust and pieces of debris were thrown into space, NASA said in a statement.
The DART impactor slammed head-on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour, ejecting over 1,000 tons of dust and rock from the asteroid. The Hubble film offers invaluable new clues about how the debris was dispersed into a complex pattern in the days after the impact, NASA said.
That was over a volume of space far greater than could be recorded by the LICIACube cubesat, which flew by the binary asteroid minutes after the DART impact, they said.
The primary goal of DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was to test our ability to change the trajectory of an asteroid as it orbits its larger companion asteroid Didymos, the agency said.
Although neither Didymos nor Dimorphos pose any threat to Earth, data from the mission will help inform researchers on how to potentially divert the asteroid’s path away from Earth if ever necessary, the statement said.
DART experiment provided new insights into planetary collisions
Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona says “The DART impact happened 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 really surprising. I think it’s fantastic. There are too many things going on here. It will take some time to figure it out”.
The film shows three overlapping phases of the impact’s aftermath: the formation of the ejection cone, the spiraling of debris captured along the asteroid’s orbit around its companion asteroid, and the wind-sleeve-like tail swept by sunlight pressure behind the asteroid. caught the breeze, the statement said.
The statement describes the Hubble movie starting 1.3 hours before impact. In this view, both Didymos and Dimorphos are in the central bright spot; not even Hubble can distinguish two asteroids separately.
The thin, straight spikes protruding away from the center (and visible in later images) are artifacts of Hubble’s optics. The debris flies away from the asteroid, traveling in the range of speeds faster than four miles per hour, fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull so it doesn’t fall back onto the asteroid, the statement said.
The ejecta forms a mostly hollow cone with long, fibrous filaments. Approximately 17 hours after impact, the debris sample entered the second phase.
The dynamical interaction within the binary begins to deform the cone shape of the ejecta pattern as described. The most striking structures are the rotating elements in the shape of a pinwheel. The windmill is tied to the gravitational force of the companion asteroid Didymos.
“That’s really unique to this particular incident,” Li said. “When I first saw these pictures, I couldn’t believe the features. I thought the picture was blurry or something.” Hubble further captures debris that is swept back into the comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on tiny dust particles, the statement said.
This extends into the debris train, where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery deepens later when Hubble observes that the tail splits in two for several days, the statement said. Many other telescopes on Earth and in space, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Lucy spacecraft, also observed the DART impact and its results. This Hubble film is part of a suite of new studies published in the journal Nature about the DART mission.
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