I just wanted to share this, as I thought it was super cool!
The University of Maryland just released these incredible images from NASA’s DART mission, showing the moment DART impacted the asteroid moon Dimorphos. The images were captured by the LICIACube spacecraft, and you can see the main asteroid Didymos moving across the frame from upper left to upper right as LICIACube flies by.
The impact on Dimorphos created an epic plume of dust and rocks, shooting out in this asymmetric cone pattern full of filaments and streams of material. Scientists think DART hit a rocky surface covered in large boulders, which got shattered and blasted out in directions they didn’t expect.
What’s really striking is how this mission shows just how complicated asteroid deflection actually is in practice. We’re making progress, but there’s clearly still a lot we need to learn about how these impacts work, if we want to use this method for planetary defense.
If you’re interested in finding out more about DART, check out this Astrum supercut we made about the mission: https://youtu.be/21YXb0bnY4E
Astrum
I just wanted to share this, as I thought it was super cool!
The University of Maryland just released these incredible images from NASA’s DART mission, showing the moment DART impacted the asteroid moon Dimorphos. The images were captured by the LICIACube spacecraft, and you can see the main asteroid Didymos moving across the frame from upper left to upper right as LICIACube flies by.
The impact on Dimorphos created an epic plume of dust and rocks, shooting out in this asymmetric cone pattern full of filaments and streams of material. Scientists think DART hit a rocky surface covered in large boulders, which got shattered and blasted out in directions they didn’t expect.
What’s really striking is how this mission shows just how complicated asteroid deflection actually is in practice. We’re making progress, but there’s clearly still a lot we need to learn about how these impacts work, if we want to use this method for planetary defense.
If you’re interested in finding out more about DART, check out this Astrum supercut we made about the mission: https://youtu.be/21YXb0bnY4E
Link to article: cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/massive-boulders-eje…
1 month ago | [YT] | 3,887