Hubble Captures Amazing Movie of DART Asteroid Impact Debris

Never-before-seen spacecraft collision brings unexpected surprises

In 2022 NASA began a daring experiment to see if they could change an asteroid’s speed by whacking it with a ballistic probe—kind of like hitting it with a hammer. This experiment was to test a potential technique to one day deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Perhaps, for the first time in the history of the universe, an intelligent planet species sought ways to avoid its own potential extinction by threats from outer space (something the dinosaurs, wiped out 65 million years ago by a rogue asteroid, never evolved to achieve). Called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), the target was a binary asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos. On September 26, 2022, Dimorphos was hit with the DART spacecraft, which was half the weight of a small car.

Hubble had a ringside seat for the demolition derby. It fired a series of snapshots over several days that captured the outflow of tons of dusty debris from the impact at 13,000 miles per hour. Astronomers did not know what to expect. They were surprised, delighted and somewhat mystified by the results. The dust blew off the asteroid into a cone shape, was spun up along the asteroid’s orbit around its companion, and was then blown into a comet-like tail. Knowing how to steer a rogue asteroid away from a catastrophic collision with Earth could one day save humanity.

This movie captures the breakup of asteroid Dimorphos as it was deliberately struck by NASA’s 1,200-pound Dual Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission spacecraft on September 26, 2022. Hubble Space Telescope had a ringside view of the space demolition derby. The Hubble movie starts 1.3 hours before the impact. The first post-shock snapshot is 2 hours after the event. Debris flies away from the asteroid in straight lines, moving faster than four miles per hour (fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull so it doesn’t fall back onto the asteroid). The ejecta forms a largely hollow cone with long, stringy filaments. 17 hours after the impact, the debris pattern entered a second stage. The dynamical interaction within the binary system began to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is bound to the gravity of the companion asteroid, Didymos. Hubble then captures the debris, which is swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles. This extends into a debris train, with the lightest particles traveling fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery later worsens when Hubble records that the tail splits in two for a few days. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI and Jian-Yang Li (PSI); Video: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

The Hubble Space Telescope captures movies of the DART asteroid debris

As a sports photographer at an auto racing event, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of images of the asteroid Dimorphos as it was deliberately struck by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022.

The primary purpose of DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was to test our ability to change the trajectory of the asteroid as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. Although neither Didymos nor Dimorphos pose any threat to Earth, data from the mission will help inform scientists on how to potentially redirect an asteroid’s path away from Earth if ever needed. The DART experiment also provided fresh insight into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early solar system.

Hubble’s time-lapse movie of the aftermath of DART’s collision reveals surprising and remarkable hour-by-hour changes as dust and pieces of debris were hurled into space. The DART impactor smashed head-on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour, blasting over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off the asteroid.

The Hubble film provides invaluable new clues to how the debris was dispersed in a complex pattern in the days following the impact. This was over a volume of space much larger than could be detected by the LICIACube cubesat, which flew past the binary asteroid minutes after DART’s impact.

“The DART impact happened in a binary asteroid system. We’ve never seen an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system in real time before, and it’s really surprising. I think it’s amazing. There’s just too much going on here. It is going to take some time to figure out,” said Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. The study, led by Li along with 63 other DART team members, was published March 1 in the journal Nature.

The film shows three overlapping stages of the impact’s aftermath: the formation of an ejecta cone, the spiraling vortex of debris caught up along the asteroid’s orbit around its companion asteroid, and the tail swept behind the asteroid by the solar pressure (similar to a windbag). caught in a breeze).

The Hubble movie starts 1.3 hours before the impact. In this view, both Didymos and Dimorphos are within the central point of light; even Hubble cannot resolve the two asteroids separately. The thin, straight tips protruding from the center (and seen in later images) are artifacts of Hubble’s optics. The first post-shock snapshot is 2 hours after the event. Debris flies away from the asteroid, moving at a range of speeds faster than four miles per hour (fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravity so it doesn’t fall back onto the asteroid). The ejecta forms a largely hollow cone with long, stringy filaments.

17 hours after the impact, the debris pattern entered a second stage. The dynamical interaction within the binary system begins to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is bound to the gravity of the companion asteroid, Didymos. “This is really unique to this particular incident,” Li said. “When I first saw these pictures, I couldn’t believe these features. I thought maybe the picture was smeared or something.”

Hubble then captures the debris, which is swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles. This extends into a debris train, with the lightest particles traveling fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery later worsens when Hubble records that the tail splits in two for a few days.

A host of other telescopes on Earth and in space, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Lucy spacecraft, also observed the DART impact and its results.

This Hubble movie is part of a series of new studies published in the journal Nature about the DART mission. See NASA’s DART Data Validates Asteroid Kinetic Impact Method to learn more.

“Ejecta from the DART-Produced Active Asteroid Dimorphs” by Jian-Yang Li, Masatoshi Hirabayashi, Tony L. Farnham, Jessica M. Sunshine, Matthew M. Knight, Gonzalo Tancredi, Fernando Moreno, Brian Murphy, Cyrielle Opitom, Steve Chesley, Daniel J. Scheeres, Cristina A. Thomas, Eugene G. Fahnestock, Andrew F. Cheng, Linda Dressel, Carolyn M. Ernst, Fabio Ferrari, Alan Fitzsimmons, Simone Ieva, Stavro L. Ivanovski, Teddy Kareta, Ludmilla Kolokolova, Tim Lister , Sabina D. Raducan , Andrew S. Rivkin , Alessandro Rossi , Stefania Soldini , Angela M. Stickle , Alison Vick , Jean-Baptiste Vincent , Harold A. Weaver , Stefano Bagnulo , Michele T. Bannister , Saverio Cambioni , Adriano Campo Bagat Nancy L. Chabot, Gabriele Cremonese, R. Terik Daly, Elisabetta Dotto, David A. Glenar, Michael Granvik, Peter H. Hasselmann, Isabel Herreros, Seth Jacobson, Martin Jutzi, Thomas Kohout, Fiorangela La Forgia, Monica Lazzarin, Zhong-Yi Lin, Ramin Lolachi, Alice Lucchetti, Rachel Makadia, Elena Mazzotta E piphany, Patr ick Michel, Alessandra Migliorini, Nicholas A. Moskovitz, Jens Ormö, Maurizio Pajola, Paul Sanchez, Stephen R. Schwartz, Colin Snodgrass, Jordan Steckloff, Timothy J. Stubbs, and Josep M. Trigo-Rodriguez, March 1, 2023 , Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05811-4

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international collaboration between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, DC