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The Most Intriguing Images of DART’s Fatal Encounter With an Asteroid - Gizmodo
Sep 28, 2022 1 min, 37 secs
NASA’s DART spacecraft was 6.8 million miles from Earth when it slammed into a football stadium-sized asteroid on Monday.

Despite this immense distance, images from the impact and its aftermath are coming in, and they’re proving to be better—and far more bizarre—than we expected.

The image above was taken 2.5 minutes prior to impact and at a distance of 570 miles (920 kilometers) to the target asteroid.

With DRACO capturing one image per second, and with DART moving at 14,000 miles per hour (22,500 km/hr), this is the last image showing the two objects in a single frame.

This, the last complete image of Dimorphos, was taken when DART was 7 miles (12 km) away and 2 seconds before impact.

The image revealed Dimorphos to be an egg-shaped “rubble pile,” an asteroid weakly held together by loose conglomerations of debris, including bits of broken-up asteroids and moons.

The European Space Agency’s upcoming HERA mission will likewise attempt to gather images of the impact’s effect on the asteroid.

This final image provided our first visual confirmation that the spacecraft was no longer among the living and that DART, with pinpoint accuracy, reached its target following a 10-month journey.

DART dispatched the Italian-built probe around two weeks ago and it used its two onboard cameras, LUKE and LEIA, to capture images of the impact and the effect it had on the asteroid.

Indeed, these four images are only the beginning, as the probe performed a close fly-by of Dimorphos to investigate a possible impact crater and capture images of its opposite side.

This series of images shows the progression of the impact plume in the 20 minutes following the impact.

From this distance, the binary asteroid system appears as a single dot in telescopic images.

Italian amateur astronomer Ernesto Guido and colleagues used a 0.6-meter telescope operated by Telescope Live Observatory in Chile to capture this light curve image (showing the light intensity of an object) some 29 hours after the impact

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