DART was unable to take pictures of the moment it hit the asteroid. Either way, the aftermath.
The telescopes on Earth were watching. There was a large amount of debris from the asteroid after the collision.
The main goal of the mission was to demonstrate a way to defend the planet from space rocks in the future.
The lead of the observations working group for the mission, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at Northern Arizona University, saw the ground based images in the minutes after impact.
The sequence pictured above was captured with a telescope in South Africa. The asteroid Didymos moves across the night sky. Dimorphos, the 500-foot-wide moon of Didymos, is not visible.
John Tonry, a professor of astronomy at the University of Hawaii, pointed his telescope in the direction of the asteroid. We began taking pictures every 40 seconds.
There is a cloud of debris thrown into space by the impact of the spaceship.
Dr. Tonry said that they didn't expect to see such a large amount of dust. Discoveries favor the prepared.
Dr. Tonry is a co-principal investigator of the Asteroid Terrestrial- impact Last Alert System, which uses a South African telescope and three others around the world to look for asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth.
Even though the telescope was half a world away, Dr. Tonry was able to see the pictures after they were taken. He said that the internet is amazing. We looked at the picture and exclaimed, 'Oh my God, look at that.' Wow!
Dr. Tonry was surprised by how quickly the asteroid was moving. He said that the stuff screamed out at 4,000 miles an hour. Within an hour, that cloud was as large as the Earth.
The debris moved away from where DART hit. It is what you would expect for a plume to recoil from the surface. There was a shell of debris moving in the same direction as DART.
It's possible that DART created a wave that went through Dimorphos and blasted stuff off the far side.
The brightness went up by a factor of 10 after the hit. The dot is four times brighter than when it was. There is a cloud of slower moving debris in the vicinity of Didymos and Dimorphos.
A sequence of images was taken by a telescope in South Africa by an astronomer who lives in South Africa and works for the Planetary Science Institute. South Africa was a good place to view the impact.
The doctor said seeing the ejection was amazing. I don't think I'll ever have the chance to see that again in my life.
The Italian Space Agency released images that were taken by LICIA, a small craft that followed DART to take before- and after pictures of DimorphoCubes.
The lead for the group of scientists who performed computer simulations of the impact said that the ejecta cloud is very complicated. There are things that look like streamers. There is asymmetric ejection. It is very complicated.
Dr. Stickle and her colleagues have lots of data to work with as they attempt to understand the structure and composition of Dimorphos. There is a rubble pile that Dr. Stickle said was held together by boulders.
The Dimorphos around Didymos took 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete. The moon would have fallen closer to Didymos if the head-on impact had happened. The size of the change would show how much material was kicked off the ground.
We can start matching that to our simulation once we get the period change measurement.
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