We have video of DART colliding with the asteroid Dimorphos

NASA’s DART mission was the first test of a planetary asteroid defense system, with the spacecraft impacting the asteroid Demorphos to prove that an impact could alter its orbit around the asteroid Gemini. The mission was very successful, but unfortunately, due to the distance, the only material we have so far are blurry images from observatories and satellites.

Now, an amateur scientist is giving us a new look at the event, after he was able to piece together a video of the collision using a database of recently released preliminary images of the event taken by the companion spacecraft LICIACube. Jacinte Roger Pérez composed a series of still videos that he posted on his X account.

Rescale and crop most frames#Arrow a task#LICIACube – #Luke –
Goal: #Dydymos #Dimorphos

nasa/asi/j. Present pic.twitter.com/oQ6zAJ5y6j

– Landru79 (@landru79) November 3, 2023

In the video, you can see the huge dust lines thrown up by Dimorpho at the time of impact, which were much larger than scientists expected. The impact released more than a million kilograms of material from the small asteroid with a diameter of 160 metres, and created a dust tail that in the following months extended more than 10,000 kilometres.

Although the collision was successful and reduced Gemini’s orbital period to 33 minutes, the change was larger than scientists expected and cannot be explained by DART’s momentum transfer alone.

So scientists discovered that the ejection of material from Dimorphos, which continued for weeks after the impact, was responsible for most of the change in the asteroid’s orbit, as the escaping dust carried much greater momentum than the impact itself.

We will work in the same sequence using color data (2)#Arrow a task#LICIACube – #Luke – RGB
Goal: #Dydymos #Dimorphos

nasa/asi/j. Present pic.twitter.com/Oix5lybkmS

– Landru79 (@landru79) November 6, 2023

Test results showed that humanity could successfully divert the path of an asteroid millions of kilometers away. However, it turns out that an asteroid’s composition must also be taken into account when designing such missions, as a weak asteroid can deflect more easily than a denser one that will not lose as much material from the impact.

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