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Last September, NASA purposefully smashed a spacecraft into Dimorphos, a 160m-wide space rock orbiting a larger asteroid named Didymos. The goal of the mission, called DART , was to demonstrate humanity’s ability to redirect hazardous asteroids away from Earth. That part of the mission was a successconducted in the wake of the DART impact found that Dimorphos is made from the same material as Didymos, and that the pair of asteroids likely originated from a single body.
Before the DART impact, only ~5 percent of the light from the system originated at Dimorphos. It was drastically outshined by its larger partner Didymos, making it incredibly difficult to get distinct spectral observations of the tiny asteroid. However, after the impact, the whole system brightened considerably, and the debris, at its maximum, contributed more than 64% of the light reaching Earth-based telescopes from the system.
So if Didymos and Dimorphos are made of the same material, how did they end up as separate asteroids?“Asteroids with diameters smaller than a few tens of km can disrupt as their fast rotation applies tension on their weak internal strength, resulting in ejected material that goes into orbit and eventually accumulates into a satellite,” the researchers explain.
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