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| Plumes of debris erupting out of the asteroid Dimorphos: ASI Italian Space Agency |
As NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into an asteroid, a small satellite called
LICIACube watched from afar – now it has sent back its first images of the
collision.
NASA has smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, and a small satellite
watched the whole thing happen. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)
crashed into the 160-metre-wide moonlet Dimorphos on 26 September. Now, the
Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) has sent back
images of the collision from up close.
DART’s goal in smashing into Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid
called Didymos, was to change its orbit in a test of how we might be able to
deflect an asteroid heading towards Earth. While the spacecraft documented
its approach to the asteroid, it was destroyed in the actual collision.
That is where LICIACube comes in. DART carried the 14-kilogram satellite in
a spring-loaded box and then ejected it on 11 September so it could fly past
Dimorphos at a safe distance after the collision. This was key to both
figuring out how the collision affected the asteroid itself and determining
whether its orbit was changed.
The first images from LICIACube show huge plumes of debris erupting out of
Dimorphos after the collision. These pictures have not been analysed by
scientists yet, but eventually they will reveal information about the
asteroid’s interior and how much of it was destroyed in the smash-up.
“Now the science can start,” said Katarina Miljkovic at Curtin University in
Australia, in a statement. “We needed a large-scale experiment… This is to
ensure that, should Earth ever encounter a dangerous asteroid hurling
towards us, we would know what to do.”
It will take at least a few days to observe and calculate how Dimorphos’s
orbit around Didymos has changed. That will depend in large part on the
asteroid’s internal strength and whether its surface crumbled on collision
or stood up to the crash. It’s like hitting something with a baseball bat –
if the object is a rock and doesn’t crumble, it will go further than a piece
of fruit that breaks up into many pieces. This information will help
determine how future missions to protect Earth from any potentially
dangerous asteroids should be designed.
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Space & Astrophysics