NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed a a swarm of boulders that were ejected from asteroid Dimorphos when NASA crashed their half-tonne DART impactor spacecraft into it at approximately 22,500 km per hour.
There were a total of 37 ejected boulders, ranging in size from 1 m to 6.7 m across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around 1 km per hour, with the total mass in these detected boulders is about 0.1% the mass of Dimorphos. Astronomers believe that they could be part of an ejecta plume that was photographed by Hubble and other observatories.
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The boulders are most likely not shattered pieces of the diminutive asteroid caused by the impact. They were already scattered across the asteroid’s surface, as evident in the last close-up picture taken by the DART spacecraft just two seconds before collision, when it was only 11 km above the surface,” said the ESA.
