Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA takes a closer look at DART’s final images before asteroid crash

Trevor Mogg
By

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a distant asteroid on Monday in a mission designed to see if the force of such an impact can shift a space rock’s direction of travel.

If it worked — and we may not find out for a couple of months — then we will have a way of deflecting hazardous asteroids spotted heading toward Earth. And when you consider what happened to the dinosaurs, that would be very good news indeed.

Recommended Videos

Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, earthlings were able to tune into NASA’s online stream on Monday to watch the spacecraft smash into the asteroid in near real time. Incredible stuff considering the event was happening around 7 million miles from Earth.

Related

DART’s Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) provided the feed. Traveling toward the asteroid at a relative speed of 14,000 mph, the 525-feet-wide (160 meters) Dimorphos asteroid for a long time appeared as a tiny dot in the video, but then rapidly became larger in the frame in the seconds prior to impact. When the feed cut out and the screen turned black, everyone at Mission Control broke into applause and cheers — surely a first for a video link suddenly cutting out like that.

Aware that some folks might be interested in those final images before impact, NASA shared a post on Tuesday telling us more about them.

In the first one we see the asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes prior to impact. The image was taken by DRACO from a distance of about 570 miles (920 kilometers).

The Dimorphos asteroid as seen from NASA's DART spacecraft.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

The next image shows DART having made good progress toward the asteroid, with astonishing details now becoming visible. NASA notes how Dimorphos is “full of boulders of various sizes,” adding that the asteroid appears to lack “the fine-grained regolith, or loose, dust-rich outer material, that is seen on Earth’s moon and on other asteroids.”
The Dimorphos asteroid as seen from NASA's DART spacecraft.

Below is the last complete image of Dimorphos, captured from a distance of about 7 miles (12 kilometers) just 2 seconds before impact. According to NASA, the image shows a patch of the asteroid 100 feet (31 meters) across.

The Dimorphos asteroid as seen from NASA's DART spacecraft.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Below is DRACO’s final glimpse of Dimorphos before the DART spacecraft slams into the rock at high speed. The image was captured at up to 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the asteroid’s surface and just 1 second before impact.

“DART’s impact occurred during transmission of the image to Earth, resulting in a partial picture,” NASA said, adding that it shows a patch of the asteroid that’s 51 feet (16 meters) across.

The Dimorphos asteroid as seen from NASA's DART spacecraft.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

DART’s mission team is now gathering data from ground-based observatories in an effort to see if the impact had any effect on the asteroid’s trajectory, and if so, to what extent. We’ll be sure to report any developments just as soon as they come in.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Scientists observe the aftermath of a spacecraft crashing into asteroid
This artist’s illustration shows the ejection of a cloud of debris after NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos. The image was created with the help of the close-up photographs of Dimorphos that the DRACO camera on the DART spacecraft took right before the impact. The DART spacecraft collided with Dimorphos at a speed of over 6 kilometres per second (about 22 000 kilometres per hour). After the impact several telescopes observed the evolution of the cloud of debris, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope.

When NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid last year, it wasn't only a thrilling test of planetary defense. It was also a unique opportunity for scientists to observe an asteroid system and see the effects of the crash, letting them learn more about what asteroids are composed of. Earlier this month, images of the impact captured by the Hubble Space Telescope were released, and now we can see the impact from another view, captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO'S VLT).

The Very Large Telescope is a ground-based set of four telescopes located in Chile, which were able to see the aftermath following the DART spacecraft impacting the asteroid Dimorphos. The images show the cloud of debris thrown up by the impact, called the ejecta, between the time just before the impact on 26 September 2022 all the way through to a month later on October 25. Through this time, the cloud developed clumps and spirals and settled into a long tail formed by radiation from the sun.

Read more
Hubble sees the dramatic collision of NASA’s DART spacecraft and an asteroid
These three panels capture the breakup of the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by NASA's 1,200-pound Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft on September 26, 2022. Hubble Space Telescope had a ringside view of the space demolition derby.

Last year NASA tested out a new method for defending the planet from incoming objects by crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid. Recently, further analysis of data from the impact has shown more about what occurred during and after the impact, and how effective it was at changing the orbit of the asteroid.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of images showing the aftermath of the impact, which have been put together into a video showing the bright flash of the impact and the emerging plume of material sent up from the asteroid:

Read more
Look at this weird-shaped asteroid NASA just spotted
This collage shows six planetary radar observations of 2011 AG5 a day after the asteroid made its close approach to Earth on Feb. 3. With dimensions comparable to the Empire State Building, 2011 AG5 is one of the most elongated asteroids to be observed by planetary radar to date.

Asteroids are most often roughly spherical, but they do come in all sorts of odd shapes and sizes. From asteroid Ryugu which is shaped like a spinning top to asteroid Kleopatra which is bone shaped, these chunks of rock orbiting the sun can range in size from just a meter across to the size of dwarf planets.

Now, there's a new addition to the zoo of unusual asteroid shapes, as NASA recently announced it has observed an asteroid that is three times as long as it is wide.

Read more