With applause, swearing, and relief, exhausted scientists celebrate as NASA's DARTMission hits its target.
Second by second, as a NASA satellite hurtled toward a pile of rocks in space, scientists gathered at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory issued their unfiltered analysis.“Holy shit!”
Some in the room were simply dumbfounded. “I’m stumped,” says Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland , College Park, and DART investigator. “We knew it was going to be exciting, and I thought it was going to work, but nobody could have predicted that.” Scientists celebrate the Double Asteroid Redirection Test’s impact at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.The DART satellite, roughly the size and mass of a cow, was launched in November 2021 toward a 780-meter asteroid named Didymos. Ten months later, about an hour before impact, the spacecraft spied its final resting place: Dimorphos, the 160-meter-wide moon.
The ATLAS-STH telescope in South Africa captures the ejecta plume resulting from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test’s collision.Dozens of astronomers—professional and amateur—from all seven continents watched the collision in real-time. Through the night, scenes captured by observatories circled through DART’s internal channels.
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