Post-impact images of DART mission have not disappointed

Enlarge / Nailed the landing. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA)

At a press conference shortly before NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft smashed into an asteroid, a reporter tried to get a sense of just what would happen as a bunch of metal and electronics smashed into a pile of rubble left over from the birth of the Solar System. "Give us a sense of this combat between our spacecraft and this rock," the reporter asked a scientist at the Applied Physics Lab.

"The spacecraft's going to lose," APL's Nancy Chabot quipped back.

The amazing thing about that loss is that we got to experience it in real time, as the last image from DART's onboard camera cut out after only a small fraction of it was transmitted to Earth.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments