DART Impact Seen by Hubble and Webb - by spacewriter
) to make more observations of Dimorphos. Hubble will monitor Dimorphos ten more times over the next three weeks to monitor how the ejecta cloud from the collisions expands and fades over time.
The DART mission isn’t the first spacecraft to encounter a small solar system body. Recall, for example, the Rosetta mission, which crash landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. More recently, the OSIRIS-REx mission touched down briefly on asteroid Bennu to capture samples for future study. Hayabusa2 returned samples after a brief encounter with asteroid Ryugu and is on its way to study other asteroids within this decade.
The European Space Agency is sending its Hera mission to Dimorphos in 2024 to do a post-impact study. It will be the first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system and examine the aftermath of DART’s kinetic impact test. The idea is to see how well an asteroid deflection mission could work, in the event that one is headed directly for Earth.
The DART and Hera missions are in the vanguard of asteroid deflection studies. The threat of asteroid collisions on our planet is very real, and both NASA and ESA have worked together to develop asteroid monitoring networks. The next steps, which began with DART and will continue with HERA, will find ways to avert the threat of impact.
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