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 plowed into it. The cloud of rocks and other debris expanded quickly, like a giant puff of smoke.
More than 600 images are still on board LICIACube, waiting to be downloaded to Earth in the coming weeks.DART, which is the size of a golf cart, hit its Great Pyramid-sized target at 7:14 p.m. US Eastern time. The first images from LICIACube arrived in a control centre in Turin, Italy, just over three hours later.
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