Smacked asteroid's debris trail more than 6,000 miles long
This image made available by NOIRLab shows a plume of dust and debris blasted from the surface of the asteroid Dimorphos by NASA's DART spacecraft after it impacted on Sept. 26, 2022, captured by the U.S. National Science Foundation's NOIRLab's SOAR telescope in Chile. The expanding, comet-like tail is more than 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) long. Credit: Teddy Kareta, Matthew Knight/NOIRLab via AP

Thousands of miles of debris from the asteroid's impact is being tracked by a NASA spaceship.

The scene was captured with a telescope. Two days after the planetary defense test, a National Science Foundation lab was released.

The tail is 6,000 miles long and consists of dust and other material from the impact crater.

Matthew Knight of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Teddy Kareta used the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope to make the observation.

The tail is expected to get even longer and more dispersed, becoming so tenuous that it's impossible to see.

The material will be like any other dust floating around the solar system at that point.

More observations will be made to determine how much material was thrown from the Dimorphos.

NASA's Dart was destroyed in a head on collision. The $325 million mission was supposed to be a dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock hits us. NASA says that dimorphos and its companion rock do not pose a threat to Earth.

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