A television at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, captures the final images … [+]
In a scientific and engineering milestone on Monday, NASA managed to hurl a spacecraft at an asteroid as part of a years-long experiment in planetary protection.
Because the DART (for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) craft was not expected to survive its impact with the asteroid Dimorphos, it toted along a small cubesat called LICIA (Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids) with a camera to catch its historic demise.
LICIA separated from DART before its planned impact, which was meant to see if the cosmic collision could successfully alter the path of the asteroid. Although Dimorphos poses absolutely no threat to Earth, the mission could inform future efforts to divert asteroids or even comets that do threaten our planet.
On Tuesday the LICIA team released its first set of images that the small space camera took of DART impacting its target:
DART’s own onboard images simply cut out as the surface of Dimorphos grew to take up the entire field of view as the impact occurred. But LICIA captures what looks to be a sort of explosion caused by the crash and a resulting cloud of debris.
Observatories on the ground also caught the event, like this one in South Africa:
And NASA’s own ATLAS project to track asteroids:
Next up, astronomers will watch to see if DART succeeded in slightly altering the orbit of Dimorphos.
While there are no asteroids or comets that are currently considered a threat to any earthlings, astronomers track over a thousand on a “risk list” and many more have probably yet to be discovered at all.
