NASA’s asteroid-smashing space debris spotted by Hubble telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped the results of smashing a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphous

By Alex Wilkins

20 July 2023

The asteroid Dimorphous, three months after it was hit by a spacecraft

NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA), and Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Last year, NASA smashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos. Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured the resulting debris in stunning detail, revealing a glittering field of boulders.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) saw a 600-kilogram spacecraft impact Dimorphos, which circles a larger asteroid called Didymos, to see if it could alter the space rock’s orbit as a practice run for diverting future dangerous asteroids. The mission was a success, reducing the length of Dimorphos’s orbit by about 33 minutes following impact in September 2022.

A few months later, in December 2022, David Jewitt at the University of California, Los Angeles and his colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to learn more about the debris expelled by the collision. They found 37 large boulders, ranging in size from 1 to almost 7 metres across, seen as small sparkles of light in the picture above.

Advertisement

It is likely the rocks were loosely tied to Dimorphous’ surface, rather than shards from the body of the asteroid itself. They are also moving slowly relative to Dimorphous – at around 0.8 kilometres per hour – and their total mass is around 0.1 per cent of their parent asteroid.

Space Week: A seven-day tour of the cosmos

To celebrate the launch of our new podcast, Dead Planets Society, New Scientist editors have selected some of our most delightful premium articles about the solar system and beyond

“This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes,” Jewitt said in a statement. “The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system.”