At a news conference just before NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into an asteroid, a reporter tried to get an idea of what would happen when a pile of metal and electronics shattered into a pile of debris that what was left of the solar system from birth. “Give us a feel for this battle between our spaceship and this rock,” the reporter asked a scientist at the Applied Physics Lab.
“The spaceship will lose,” joked back APL’s Nancy Chabot.
The amazing thing about this loss is that we were able to witness it in real time as the last image from DART’s onboard camera was cropped after only a small fraction of it was transmitted to Earth.
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One of the last images captured, capturing both objects in the Didymos system: Didymos and its smaller companion Dimorphos, the latter being the target of DART
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As DART approached, Dimorphos gradually filled his camera’s field of view.
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The last image captured and transmitted by DART prior to the planned catastrophic dismantling.
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The one that didn’t quite make it because the transmission of the image data was disrupted by the destruction of all transmission hardware.
Details of the spacecraft’s crash landing/impact with the asteroid Dimorphos had to be captured with cameras located slightly further from the point of impact. Many of these have now been made available, so we’ve put together a collection of them and describe a bit of what you can see.
The closest cameras we had were on board LICIACube, a CubeSat that was launched aboard DART and then separated a few weeks before impact. LICIACube had two onboard cameras (named Luke and Leia), one that takes wide-angle shots and one that’s better at focusing on details. The Italian space agency, which led the LICIACube mission, didn’t specify which camera produced which image, but it did release some of them, including a distant view of the collision, close-ups taken shortly after, and an animation showing the sudden brightening after the Collision scattered material into space.
For those unsure, the collision alone did not produce enough light to be visible in these images. Instead, the debris ejected from the asteroid by DART reflected far more sunlight than the asteroid alone could.
The brightening was large enough that ground-based telescopes also picked up the brightening; In some cases, their operators put the images online as soon as they became available. Both I’ve found show the Didymos/Dimorphos system peacefully moving past background stars from Earth’s perspective (with most of the light reflecting off the much larger Didymos). Suddenly, the object brightens significantly, and the debris gradually moves to one side of the asteroid.
There are two major differences between the images. An image taken by the ATLAS project, which is based in Hawaii but has telescopes in South America and South Africa – the collision was only visible from the last of these. In his image, the asteroid moves from right to left in front of the background stars.
ATLAS observations of DART spacecraft impact at Didymos! pic.twitter.com/26IKwB9VSo
— ATLAS project (@fallingstarIfA) September 27, 2022
In contrast, Las Cumbres Observatory data from a telescope in South Africa show the Didymos system moving in the opposite direction across the starfield. But it also has some pretty important information: timestamps for each exposure in the animation, making it clear that most of the action took place over about half an hour.
Animation (500x accelerated) of one of the @LCO_Global‘s 1 meter telescope @SAAO South Africa with effects of #DARTMission Impact on Dimorphos (Still no threat to Earth… Long straight streak is camera artifact) pic.twitter.com/StYWtLARgG
— Tim Lister (@astrosnapper) September 27, 2022
ESA also produced video of the collision covering the same period and posted it online.
#Postimpact #images #DART #mission #disappoint
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