Two tails of dust ejected from the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system are seen in new images from the … [+]
We now know that when you throw a spacecraft at an asteroid from California and manage to hit it, it can have some unexpected effects.
That’s basically what’s going on with the small asteroid Dimorphos, which is perhaps better thought of as a tiny moonlet that orbits the larger asteroid Didymos, ever since NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) managed to impact it on September 27.
New images from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope show that Dimorphos has developed a twin tail since literally having the space snot knocked out of it rather rudely last month.
Let’s consider it a worthy infraction of cosmic manners in the name of developing a defense for humanity against potential future interplanetary interlopers. The whole point of DART was to see if smashing into a space rock could knock it off its course, just in case we should need to do so to avoid a potentially catastrophic impact like the one that drove the dinosaurs to extinction.
And it turns out that the technique was successful, altering the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos by a significant amount.
NASA mission scientists say that some portion of this change comes from the stream of ejecta, which is not actually snot, but instead dust and debris that was created by the impact. Jets of junk dislodged by the crash literally helped push Dimorphos on to a new orbital path.
In the process, those jets gave Dimorphos a new look: a tail similar to that of a comet. And now upon closer inspection, Hubble has revealed that it’s actually a double-tail of detritus.
The tails are a little fuzzy in the above image, but they’re there. NASA and the European Space Agency say the top fork of the tail is newly developed since a tail first emerged soon after impact.
Researchers so far say they’re not exactly sure how the second tail developed and will be investigating a number of possible explanations.
