The asteroid Dimorphous, three months after it was hit by a spacecraft
NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA), and Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Final yr, NASA smashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos. Now, the Hubble Area Telescope has captured the ensuing particles in beautiful element, revealing a glittering discipline of boulders.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) noticed a 600-kilogram spacecraft affect Dimorphos, which circles a bigger asteroid referred to as Didymos, to see if it might alter the area rock’s orbit as a follow run for diverting future harmful asteroids. The mission was a hit, lowering the size of Dimorphos’s orbit by about 33 minutes following affect in September 2022.
A number of months later, in December 2022, David Jewitt on the College of California, Los Angeles and his colleagues used the Hubble Area Telescope to be taught extra concerning the particles expelled by the collision. They discovered 37 giant boulders, ranging in dimension from 1 to virtually 7 metres throughout, seen as small sparkles of sunshine within the image above.
It’s probably the rocks have been loosely tied to Dimorphous’ floor, relatively than shards from the physique of the asteroid itself. They’re additionally shifting slowly relative to Dimorphous at round 0.8 kilometres per hour and their complete mass is round 0.1 per cent of their dad or mum asteroid.
“This tells us for the primary time what occurs once you hit an asteroid and see materials popping out as much as the biggest sizes,” Jewitt mentioned in a statement. “The boulders are a number of the faintest issues ever imaged inside our photo voltaic system.”
This cloud of boulders will likely be studied additional by the European Area Company’s Hera spacecraft, which is scheduled to go away Earth in October 2024 and arrive at Didymos and Dimorphos on the finish of 2026. By utilizing the Hubble observations taken now and future Hera observations, astronomers may be capable to pin down the boulders’ precise trajectories.
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