About 11 million kilometers from Earth, the DART spacecraft (“Dart”) collided with the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, to study the possibility of diverting the trajectory of a celestial body that might strike the planet. And this is what happened, as the asteroid’s trajectory has already been changed. But images taken by the Hubble telescope show that the collision also launched 37 boulders into the universe, ranging in width from one meter to more than seven meters.
These rocks represent about 2% of all those identified on the surface of the 160-meter-diameter asteroid Dimorphos, which looks more like a jumble of large rocks bound by their mutual gravitational pull than a solid mass.
The rocks scattered by the collision moved away from the asteroid very slowly, at a speed of about one kilometer per hour, according to a statement issued by the operators of the Hubble Space Telescope. This slowness will allow the European Space Agency’s HERA mission – which is expected to examine the asteroid in 2026 – to monitor the rocks.
The scattering of rocks caused by the collision shows that “Dart” has created a crater about 50 meters wide on the asteroid. Scientists will continue to study the trajectory of the rocks to understand “the directions in which they were ejected from the surface.”
The Dart spacecraft was launched on November 24, 2021 and spent 10 months on its journey to reach its target, the asteroid.
The investigation team confirmed that the spacecraft collision shortened the orbital period by 32 minutes from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes, according to NASA.
