The impact of NASA's DART probe into the space rock Dimorphos was photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
According to NASA, the first job the two space telescopes performed in unison was to observe an asteroid. The Hubble Space Telescope is able to detect optical light that is visible to the human eye. Astronomers can learn a lot from combining observations from the telescopes.
The Didymos system was observed by both Hubble and the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Didymos is a 2,560-foot-wide (780 m) space rock that is the subject of the DART experiment.
The first images of DART's asteroid crash are here.
When DART arrived, the asteroid pair appeared to be a dot of light in the sky. The cloud of material stirred from the surface of Dimorphos spread away from that dot over the course of several hours.
In the wake of DART's impact, the Didymos system had a threefold increase in brightness.
The images were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The images are being analyzed by the astronomer. They want to learn more about the surface of Dimorphos and the material ejected by the collision. The European Space Agency said in a statement that they might be able to tell if the ejecta is made of fine-grained dust or larger rocky fragments. The asteroid system will be observed by both telescopes.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that we learn more when we work together. "For the first time, the two space probes have captured images of the same object in the same place, an asteroid that was hit by a craft after seven million miles away." All of humanity is waiting for the discoveries to come from our ground-based telescopes.
The DART mission was the first attempt to change the position of a body in the sky. One day, the mission may save Earth from a collision with a stray space rock. Didymos and dimorphos are not threats to our planet.
The Didymos system is being looked at by hundreds of ground-based telescopes to determine how much the moonlet changed after the impact. It might take a while to get the result.
A small Italian cubesat called LICIACube, which traveled to the Didymos asteroid aboard DART but was released 11 days before the impact, was able to observe the action as it unfolded from a distance of hundreds of miles.
A European mission called Hera will explore the aftermath of the impact of the double asteroid.
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