This is the last five minutes in the life of the DART spacecraft (shown sped-up) 💥 The video shows the craft zooming past the asteroid Didymos as it approaches its target, Dimorphos, for impact. [Video credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL].
As the Italian probe LICIACube whizzed past asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos , it captured a debris plume spraying out from the DART spacecraft smashing into Dimorphos.on 26 September. The smash-up was “the first human experiment to deflect a celestial body”, says Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, and “an enormous success”.
A ringside view came from LICIACube, a tiny Italian spacecraft that flew along with DART and photographed the impact, which took place 11 million kilometres from Earth. LICIACube’s first images, released by the Italian Space Agency on 27 September, show a large fireworks-like plume coming off Dimorphos after DART had ploughed into it. The cloud of rocks and other debris expanded quickly, like a giant puff of smoke.
NASA’s Hubble telescope observed DART colliding with Dimorphos from space. In this animated series of images, the telescope records the evolution of ejected debris from 22 minutes to 8.2 hours after impact.LICIACube, which is Italy’s first deep-space mission, used an autonomous guiding technique to keep its cameras locked on Dimorphos as it whizzed past in the aftermath of the DART crash, just 55 kilometres from the asteroid.
Despite the huge plume of ejected debris, Dimorphos remains mostly intact. Ground-based telescopes confirmed this by capturing other views of the impact, whichs. Dimorphos is currently visible chiefly from the Southern Hemisphere, so these initial observations came from telescopes in locations such as Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, and South Africa. Dozens of telescopes continue to monitor it, to determine whether its trajectory has changed.
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