NASA Slammed Into an Asteroid and Hubble Just Spotted a Spectacular Effect
upstart writes:
NASA's unprecedented asteroid experiment is still churning out results:
Last year in a mission called DART, the space agency intentionally slammed a sacrificial spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos, which was 7 million miles from Earth. Scientists hoped to prove civilization could alter the path of a menacing asteroid - should one be on a collision course with our planet - and they successfully nudged the (non-threatening) 525-foot-wide space rock.
Now, planetary researchers are watching the aftermath of the event to gather all the information possible about how to best change the trajectory of, or deflect, a future incoming asteroid. NASA released an image captured by the legendary Hubble Space Telescope - orbiting some 332 miles above Earth - showing a "swarm of boulders" from the experimental impact, which you can see below.
"This is a spectacular observation - much better than I expected," David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at The University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. "We see a cloud of boulders carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos by the impact."
"The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system," Jewitt added.
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