According to Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s assistant administrator for science, the collision was “the first human experiment to deflect a celestial body” and “an tremendous success.”
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Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, adds, “We’re all quite stoked here.”
LICIACube, a small Italian spacecraft that accompanied DART and snapped photos of the impact from a distance of 11 million kilometres from Earth, provided a front-row seat. The Italian Space Agency released the first photographs from LICIACube on September 27th, depicting a massive fireworks-like plume erupting from Dimorphos following the impact of DART. Like a massive burst of smoke, the cloud of pebbles and other debris swiftly grew.
Science team lead for LICIACube at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, Elisabetta Dotto, stated at a press event that studying the plume’s evolution would provide insight into Dimorphos’ physical attributes. Analysis of the plume’s formation and evolution will allow scientists to determine how much of DART’s kinetic energy was used to expel debris from Dimorphos and how much may have been used to change the asteroid’s orbit.
The spaceship itself has been completed. Megan Bruck Syal, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says, “A lot of it is pulverised, and some of it is melted.” However, I doubt there will be significant pieces remaining.
After the DART disaster, Italy’s first deep-space mission, LICIACube, sped past Dimorphos at a distance of only 55 kilometres. Its cameras remained fixed on the asteroid thanks to an automated guiding mechanism. Two cameras, one black-and-white called LEIA and another called LUKE with three colours, were employed to take pictures of Dimorphos just before and just after the crash. Images taken at impact time reveal a sudden brightening, followed by the plume’s expansion and outward drift in the minutes that followed. The “spidery” features seen in the debris plume, as described by Bruck Syal, will aid modellers in determining the precise nature of the collision.
In the following weeks, more than 600 photos that are still aboard LICIACube will be sent to Earth.
Unorganized pile of stones
At 7:14 p.m. US Eastern Time, DART, which is about the size of a golf cart, successfully hit a target the size of the Great Pyramid. Just over three hours after LICIACube’s initial image transmission, it arrived to an Italian control centre.
Even with the massive debris cloud it emitted, Dimorphos is still mostly intact. Additional images captured by ground-based telescopes after the impact corroborated this, showing the expanding plume as the asteroid continued on its path. Since the Southern Hemisphere is now the best place to view Dimorphos, the earliest sightings were made using telescopes in places like Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean and South Africa. Dozens of telescopes are still keeping an eye on it to see whether its course has changed.
Whether or not DART was successful in its primary mission of accelerating Dimorphos’ orbit around its partner asteroid, Didymos, by maybe 10 or more minutes will take astronomers days to weeks to confirm. Neither of these asteroids poses any kind of immediate risk to Earth, but the purpose of the test is to see whether or not humanity would be capable of changing the course of an asteroid if one were ever discovered and was headed in our direction.
Before DART’s arrival, a close-up look of a Dimorphos had never been possible. Eventually, the spaceship got close enough to see that the asteroid has the shape of an egg. While descending, DART took a sequence of photos that show that Dimorphos is, in fact, littered with rocks. Clearly, a pile of debris, as Rivkin puts it. Simply put, “a pile of rocks.”
Source: Google Trend
