DART: The first images of the craft that collided with the asteroid
They were captured by the LICIAcube satellite
After years of planning, NASA’s DART mission has been crowned with success after its spacecraft managed to collide with the asteroid Dimorphos, humanity’s first attempt to change the course of a large cosmic object. The images brought back by the craft showed us its approach to the asteroid before the signal was lost by the collision, but we all wondered what the collision would look like from the perspective of a nearby observer.
This role was taken over by the LICIAcube auxiliary satellite of the Italian space agency ASI. Equipped with two optical cameras, he managed to record the collision from a safe distance, and now the first images have been released.
In the images above, the large bright object is the constellation Gemini. The fine web-like lines are the gases and dust ejected from Dimorph immediately after the collision. The images will give scientists information about the percentage of Dimorphos that was destroyed, as well as its composition.
In the post below, you can see the sequential images of the collision with Dimorphos as it orbits Gemini, as captured by the ground-based ATLAS telescope.
Months of continuous observations now await scientists as they try to determine if the collision was enough to change Dimorph’s orbit, and by how much. Dimorphos was chosen because it is trapped in a well-known orbital period around Gemini, making it easier to detect changes than an asteroid that would be on its own.
From this collision alone, we can learn more about the mechanics of collisions with small bodies, momentum transfer, and the possibility of using artificial objects to alter the trajectory of asteroids. This has never happened before. We needed a large-scale experiment to validate the technique with real data. This will ensure that if Earth is ever threatened by a dangerous asteroid, we will know what to do.
