The Hubble Space Telescope continues to amaze even after nearly 33-years in service, and this footage of NASA’s DART spacecraft crashing into asteroid Dimorpohos is no exception. This 545-kilogram (1201-pound) Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft was captured on September 26, 2022 and starts at 1.3 hours before impact.
The first post-impact snapshot is observed 20 minutes after the event, showing debris flying away from the asteroid in straight lines at more than 4mph, or fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull, so it doesn’t fall back. A hollow cone with long, stringy filaments is formed by its ejecta. Approximately 17-hours after impact, the debris pattern entered a second stage where dynamic interaction within the binary system started to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern.
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The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is tied to the gravitational pull of the companion asteroid, Didymos. Hubble next captures the debris being swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles. This stretches out into a debris train where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid,” said the European Space Agency.
