On September 26, 2022, NASA’s DART mission probe intentionally crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, which was about 11 million kilometers from Earth at the time of impact. This exercise was intended to allow NASA to train for the what-if scenario of an asteroid threatening to hit Earth in the future.
The DART impact succeeded in deflecting the path of Dimorphos, and images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that it also released 37 rocks with diameters between 1 and more than 7 meters, which are slowly moving away from the asteroid at a speed of approximately 1 km/h.
The next step of the mission will be carried out by the European Space Agency with the Hera probe, which is scheduled to inspect the asteroid in 2026. Hera will have the opportunity to observe the cloud of rocks generated by the DART impact.
This image provides insight into the results of hitting an asteroid and what comes from it for the first time. The scattering of the rocks suggests that DART created a crater approximately 50 meters in diameter on the asteroid. Scientists will continue to study the trajectory of the released rocks to understand in which directions they were ejected.
This experiment represents an important step in the study and understanding of how collisions with asteroids can affect their trajectory and behavior, which is crucial to developing planetary defense strategies against the potential threat of asteroid impacts on Earth.