DART Impact Ejected 37 Giant Boulders from Asteroid Dimorphos' Surface By Nancy_A
The last complete image of asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, taken by the DRACO imager on NASA’s DART mission from ~7 miles from the asteroid and 2 seconds before impact. The image shows a patch of the asteroid that is 100 feet across. Dimorphos’ north is toward the top of the image. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
The bright white object at lower left is the asteroid Dimorphos. It has a blue dust tail extending diagonally to the upper right. A cluster of blue dots surrounds the asteroid. These are boulders that were knocked off the asteroid when, on 26 September 2022, NASA deliberately slammed the half-tonne DART impactor spacecraft into the asteroid as a test of what it would take to deflect some future asteroid from hitting Earth. Hubble photographed the slow-moving boulders in December 2022.
One explanation for Dimorphos’ formation is that Didymos may have spun up too quickly or could have lost material after a glancing collision with another object. The ejected material would have formed a ring that gravitationally coalesced to form Dimorphos, making it a flying rubble pile of rocky debris loosely held together by the relatively weak pull of its gravity. If this is the case, the interior is probably not solid, but it would have a structure more like a bunch of grapes.
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