Last September, NASA crashed the refrigerator-sized DART spacecraft into a small asteroid named Dimorphos at a speed of some 13,000 mph (21,000 km/h). The impact not only successfully changed the trajectory of Dimorphos, which orbits a companion asteroid named Didymos. It also ejected an expansive cloud of debris that gracefully evolved over the next several weeks.
In the days following the impact, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope trained its eye on Dimorphos’ ejecta cloud to help astronomers track hour-by-hour changes in the more than 1,000 tons of dust and rock that were blasted from the asteroid. This three-panel image shows how that debris cloud evolved in the weeks following the impact.
SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, STScI, Jian-Yang Li (PSI); IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
The topmost panel in the image, which Hubble captured just 2 hours after the impact, reveals an ejecta cone of debris around Dimorphos. As the ejected particles that ...
