NASA vehicle collision with an asteroid last year caused a "rock cloud"

A spacecraft belonging to the US space agency NASA sent a "rock cloud" into space when it collided with an asteroid last year, as shown in images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and published on Thursday.

The spacecraft, named DART ("Double Asteroid Redirection Test"), collided with the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, at a distance of about 11 million kilometers from Earth, to study the possibility of altering the trajectory of a celestial body that could potentially impact our planet.

The impact of DART already caused a change in the asteroid's course. However, images taken by the Hubble Telescope reveal that the collision also released 37 rocks into space, ranging in size from one meter to over seven meters.

These rocks represent about 2% of all those identified on the surface of the 160-meter-diameter Dimorphos asteroid, which closely resembles a mixture of large rocks bound together by mutual gravity rather than a solid mass.

The scattered rocks due to the collision are moving away from the asteroid at an extremely slow pace of about one kilometer per hour, according to a statement from the Hubble Space Telescope team. This slow speed will allow the European Space Agency's Hera mission, expected to examine the asteroid in 2026, to monitor the rocks.

The scattering pattern of the rocks resulting from the collision indicates that DART created a crater with an approximate width of 50 meters on the asteroid's surface.

Scientists will continue to study the trajectory of these rocks to understand "the directions through which they were ejected from the surface."





AFP