NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been able to capture an hour-by-hour encounter of Dimorphos being hit by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) on September 26, 2022.
The DART mission aims to test its ability to alter the Dimorphos’s trajectory as it orbits another asteroid, Didymos.
As per NASA, Didymos and Dimorphos do not pose any harm to the planet. However, the space agency is using the data from this mission to prepare researchers regarding diverting an asteroid’s path away from the earth.
The time-lapse below shows the hour-by-hour changes during the collision’s aftermath, where 1000 tonnes of dust and debris have spread all over the area.
The real-time visuals are surprising for NASA. “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. It’s going to take some time to figure out, says Jian-Yang Li, who is leading one of the studies for the mission.
Apart from the Hubble Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope and Lucy spacecraft also observed the DART impact.
