Photo: ASI/NASA / copyright
The asteroid flies through space in this black and white video when suddenly a huge cloud of debris spreads out in front of it, which means only one thing: impact.
Astronomers have applauded these first images of the first time humanity has deliberately collided with an asteroid, saying it appears to have done “a lot of damage”.
That would be good news, because the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) impactor of the NASA hit the asteroid Dimorphos at 26.500 kilometers per hour this Monday (28.09.2022) at night in order to divert its trajectory.
Historical proof to defend against a future astroid
Although Dimorphos is at millions of kilometers away and poses no threat to Earth, it is being used as historical proof so that the world can be prepared to defend itself if a future astroid heads towards Earth .
After the impact, ground-based telescopes and the toaster-sized satellite LICIACube, which separated from DART a few weeks ago, revealed the first images of the collision.
“In the LICIACube images, the plume of what came off the surface was quite impressive. pressing,” Antonella Barucci, from the Paris Observatory’s LESIA laboratory, told AFP.
Here are the first images taken by #LICIACube of #DARTmission impact on asteroid #Dimorphos.
Now weeks and months of hard work are now starting for scientists and technicians involved in this mission, so stay tuned because we will have a lot to tell! pic.twitter.com/kVz1WmcsL7— LICIACube (@LICIACube) September 26, 2022
By examining the plume, “we can begin to estimate the density of the material at the surface,” he said. The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project tweeted a nine-second video of the impact taken by its telescope in South Africa on Tuesday.
ATLAS co-principal investigator Larry Denneau said the telescope took one image every 40 seconds. “So the whole sequence that has been seen on Twitter lasts about two hours in real time,” he told AFP.
He said the The “very, very large” plume was made by dust shooting off the asteroid. “A lot of the dust breaks off faster than the asteroid’s gravity, so it escapes,” Denneau explained.
The plume expanded to “several thousand kilometers in diameter”, he added.
ATLAS observations of the DART spacecraft impact at Didymos! pic.twitter.com/IKwB9VSo
— ATLAS Project (@fallingstarIfA) September 27, 2022
Study the trajectory of the asteroid
In the coming days and weeks, astronomers around the world will work to confirm whether the asteroid’s trajectory was definitely altered by the impact.
Next, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will arrive at Dimorphos in 2026 to study the surface and discover the extent of the DART impact.
The principal investigator of the Hera mission, Patrick Michel, said that “we are all impressed due to the magnitude of the event.
“We have done a lot of damage to Dimorphos”, said Michel. “We have an amount of matter ejected that is quite incredible,” he added.
Disappearance of a large piece of asteroid
The amount of matter stripped from the asteroid will help scientists determine exactly how much, if any, its trajectory has been affected.
“The more material that is ejected , the more it deviates,” said Eric Lagadec, president of the French Astronomical Society. “So that’s a very good sign,” he added.