The Most Intriguing Images of DART’s Fatal Encounter With an Asteroid

The gravitationally bonded pair are separated by just 3,960 feet (1,200 meters). Didymos, measuring 2,650 feet wide (780 meters), was discovered in 1996 and its moonlet Dimorphos, measuring 520 feet wide (160 meters), was spotted seven years later. We really had no clue what these tiny objects looked like given the vast distances involved, but DART’s high-res DRACO instrument revealed the pair in exquisite detail.

The image above was taken 2.5 minutes prior to impact and at a distance of 570 miles (920 kilometers) to the target asteroid. With DRACO capturing one image per second, and with DART moving at 14,000 miles per hour (22,500 km/hr), this is the last image showing the two objects in a single frame.

This, the last complete image of Dimorphos, was taken when DART was 7 miles (12 km) away and 2 seconds before impact. The image revealed Dimorphos to be an egg-shaped “rubble pile,” an asteroid weakly held together by loose conglomerations of debris, including bits of broken-up asteroids and moons.

This tiny patch of Dimorphos is where DART finally met its fate, and it’s the last complete frame produced by the probe. Fair to say, this patch don’t look like that no more, with the 1,376-pound probe plowing directly into its target. The resulting kinetic impact, it is hoped, altered the asteroid’s speed and orbital trajectory around Didymos. Ultimately, the experiment could yield an effective planetary defense strategy against hazardous near-Earth objects.

A key goal of the LICIACube mission was to snap post-impact images of Dimorphos. The European Space Agency’s upcoming HERA mission will likewise attempt to gather images of the impact’s effect on the asteroid.

DART was in the process of transmitting its next DRACO frame when it finally crashed onto the surface. This final image provided our first visual confirmation that the spacecraft was no longer among the living and that DART, with pinpoint accuracy, reached its target following a 10-month journey.

This stabilized timelapse of the DART experiment shows the final five-and-a-half minutes of the test in just 30 seconds. The video was put together by YouTube channel Spei’s Space News from Germany.

This stunning view of the impact was captured by LICIACube, which was less than 34 miles (55 km) from Dimorphos at the time. DART dispatched the Italian-built probe around two weeks ago and it used its two onboard cameras, LUKE and LEIA, to capture images of the impact and the effect it had on the asteroid. The bright object in the foreground is Didymos.

An unusually large and complex plume sprouted out from the asteroid as a result of the collision. “I’m shocked by the streamers in the ejecta [the material tossed up by the impact],” tweeted University of Central Florida Planetary Scientist Phil Metzger. In ordinary laboratory impact splash experiments to simulate asteroid impacts “we see nothing like this,” he added.

Another view of the impact, as imaged by LICIACube, short for the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging Asteroids. The 31-pound (14-kilogram) probe, Italy’s first deep-space spacecraft, used an autonomous tracker to keep its two cameras locked onto the target asteroid.

The strangeness of the impact plume will be of great interest to scientists, who will undoubtedly study it in great detail. The resulting insights will shed important new light on the asteroid, such as its composition and volume. LICIACube took some 600 images during the encounter, which it’s currently in the process of uplinking to Earth. Indeed, these four images are only the beginning, as the probe performed a close fly-by of Dimorphos to investigate a possible impact crater and capture images of its opposite side.

This series of images shows the progression of the impact plume in the 20 minutes following the impact. It was taken from the Klein Karoo Observatory in South Africa, in collaboration with Italy’s Virtual Telescope Project. From this distance, the binary asteroid system appears as a single dot in telescopic images.

This video of the plume was captured by astronomers at the Les Makes Observatory in Le Reunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean. “Something like this has never been done before, and we weren’t entirely sure what to expect,” Marco Micheli, an astronomer at ESA’s Near-Earth Objects Coordination Centre, said in a press release. “It was an emotional moment for us as the footage came in.” At the time of the impact, Didymos was only visible to observatories in the Southern Hemisphere.

The animation above was stitched together by astronomers with the ATLAS project in Hawaii. Ground-based images consistently showed a growing plume moving in the direction of the asteroid. The binary star system is so far that it takes 38 seconds for its light to reach Earth.

Italian amateur astronomer Ernesto Guido and colleagues used a 0.6-meter telescope operated by Telescope Live Observatory in Chile to capture this light curve image (showing the light intensity of an object) some 29 hours after the impact. A tail or plume is now visible in the Didymos-Dimorphos system, which may eventually wrap around to form a ring.

Several space-based telescopes were tuned into the encounter, namely Hubble, Webb, and a camera mounted to NASA’s Lucy probe currently en route to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The image above was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope from the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, placing it some 6 million miles (9.7 million km) from Didymos. Astronomers used its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture this image, showing a “a tight, compact core, with plumes of material appearing as wisps streaming away from the centre of where the impact took place,” according to a European Space Agency press release.

These Hubble images, captured by its Wide Field Camera 3, show the impact 22 minutes, 5 hours, and 8.2 hours after the DART experiment. Plenty of material can be seen sprouting out from the asteroid, and some of the rays have a slight curve to them. The brightness of the object increased by three times after the impact, and this brightness held true for a surprisingly long eight-hour period. Astronomers will now study and attempt to explain these fascinating observations.