NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into a small space rock last year, and the effects were visible from Earth orbit.
The famed Hubble Space Telescope tracked dramatic hour-by-hour changes in deep space caused by a NASA probe's deliberate asteroid crash.
Fresh imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope released today shows dust and debris flying at high speed away from Dimorphos and its larger asteroid companion, Didymos, after DART's impact. The collision is believed to have thrown about 1,000 tons of ancient asteroid material into space. "We've never witnessed an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real time, and it's really surprising. I think it's fantastic. Too much stuff is going on here.
Information based on Hubble's work indicates at least three stages of Dimorphos debris evolution. First an ejecta cone was formed, then the debris furled into the asteroid's orbit, and finally the tail moved behind the asteroid due to the pressure of the solar wind , the stream of charged particles flowing constantly from our sun.
Then the last stage shows debris sweeping behind the asteroid,"where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid," STScI officials added. But the processes have yet to be understood, as Hubble saw the tail splitting into two streams for a few days and the mechanism by which that happened is not clear.
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