NASA’s Asteroid Mission Impact Caused Space Rock Flash Avalanche: ScienceAlert

A new observation reveals the continuing impact humanity made after intercepting a piece of rock drifting around the sun last year.

In September 2022, a NASA spacecraft crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos. Hubble latest notes It shows a giant swarm of rocks shaken by the impact, scattered like stars in the asteroid’s wake.

The new images will help an upcoming mission to the asteroid study the results of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), to help optimize and better plan for such impacts in the future.

“This is a great note—much better than I expected.” says planetary scientist David Jewett from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We see a cloud of rocks carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the rocks correspond to the fall off the surface of Dimorphos by the impact.

“This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material come out in larger sizes. The rocks are some of the weakest objects ever imaged within our solar system.”

The DART mission may sound like a lot of fun (and let’s be honest here, it was), but it had a very serious purpose. The goal was to try to push Dimorphos a little further from its current orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos, to test how well we might be able to do this in the event of a potentially dangerous asteroid heading toward Earth.

The test was a huge success. Although Dimorphos and Didymos are still gravitationally bound as a binary asteroid, their previous orbital period of 7.9 hours has decreased by 33 minutes. This is a more remarkable result than expected.

However, we still don’t know much about the ongoing effects of the collision, so scientists continue to monitor the binary asteroid, using telescopes like Hubble to detect faint changes that other instruments might miss.

On December 19, 2022, Hubble took observations of the object They have just been releasedA cloud of rocks scattered in space appears around Dimorphos and Didymus.

Scientists counted 37 rocks, ranging in size from 1 to 6.7 meters (3 to 22 feet), slowly moving away from the asteroid at a rate of 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) per hour.

Although the DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos at about 22,500 kilometers (14,000 miles) per hour, the debris may not have been pieces of asteroids.

Prior to the impact, images from DART show loose rocks on the asteroid’s surface; It is possible that the impact corrupted them, although the exact how is not yet known. Initial impact could have been responsible; Or, it may have triggered seismic tremors that caused it to subsequently disintegrate.

A spacecraft called Hera, which will launch in 2024, will visit the asteroid to study the results of the collision test.

“Cloud Rock will still disperse when Hera arrives,” Jewett says. “It’s like a very slowly expanding swarm of bees that will eventually scatter along the binary pair’s orbit around the sun.”

Meanwhile, Hubble’s constant check-ins will help scientists calculate the tracks of rocks away from the asteroid so we can learn exactly where they blasted off — which, in turn, could help us figure out how they got off in the first place.

You can download a wallpaper-sized version of the ESA Hubble website.