NASA’s Telescope Captures DART Asteroid Impact Debris

The US space agency NASA notified its Hubble Space Telescope has captured a series of the asteroid ‘Dimorphos’ photos. A collision was deliberately hit by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) on 26 September last year.

According to reports, the primary objective of DART was to test our ability to alter the asteroid's trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos.

Though neither Didymos nor Dimorphos poses any threat to Earth, the data gathered from the mission will help to educate researchers on the potential diversion of an asteroid's path away from Earth, if ever necessary.

The DART experiment provides fresh insights into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early solar system.

Hubble's time-lapse movie reveals surprising and remarkable changes in the aftermath of DART's collision

“We have never witnessed a collision wherein an object collides with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real-time”, said Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

The Hubble movie highlights hour-by-hour changes after the dust and chunk debris flung into space and smashed head-on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour marking a DART impactor blast that caused over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off the asteroid.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project under international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). And the telescope is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.