Boulders from NASA DART Spacecraft Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos | Hubble

Boulders from NASA DART Spacecraft Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos | Hubble

This NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on December 19, 2022, nearly four months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission. Hubble’s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision. These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the Solar System. The ejected boulders range in size from 1 meter to 6.7 meters across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around a kilometer per hour. The discovery yields invaluable insights into the behavior of a small asteroid when it is hit by a projectile for the purpose of altering its trajectory.

Image Description: The bright white object at lower left is the asteroid Dimorphos. It has a blue dust tail extending diagonally to the upper right. A cluster of blue dots surrounds the asteroid. These are boulders that were knocked off the asteroid when, on September 26, 2022, NASA deliberately slammed the half-ton DART impactor spacecraft into the asteroid as a test of what it would take to deflect some future asteroid from hitting Earth. Hubble photographed the slow-moving boulders in December 2022.

Dimorphos is a natural satellite or moon of the near-Earth asteroid 65803 Didymos, with which it forms a binary system. Dimorphos has a diameter of 177 meters (581 ft) across its longest extent. Before the impact with NASA's DART spacecraft, Dimorphos had a shape of an oblate spheroid with a surface covered in boulders, but virtually no craters.

Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), D. Jewitt (UCLA)

Release Date: July 20, 2023

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