NASA’s asteroid smashing spacecraft completed its spectacular doomed attack on a distant asteroid last night, and we already have three awe-inspiring videos of the event.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided with the 7 million mile (11 million kilometer) distant asteroid Dimorphos at 7:14 p.m. ET on Monday (Sept. 26) in humanity’s first attempt to alter an asteroid’s trajectory.
DART recorded and beamed back its final moments with its onboard Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO), which was also responsible for automatically navigating the spacecraft onto its collision course. As DART came ever closer to the space rock, its camera feed showed the asteroid’s landscape bloom from a single pale gray pixel to a rough and craggy terrain strewn with sharp, shadowy rocks.
Related: What happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth?
“We saw that we were going to impact. This asteroid was coming into the field of view for the first time. We really had no idea what to expect,” Elena Adams, a mission systems and the spacecraft systems engineer for the DART mission, said at a news conference (opens in new tab) after the event. “All of us were kind of holding our breaths.”
Then the recording cuts out. Adams said that DART had hit the 525-feet-wide (160 meters) Dimorphos just 56 feet (17 m) from its exact center — an astronomical “bullseye.” At mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, cheers erupted from the mission scientists.
“As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success,” Adams said at the news conference. “I think Earthlings should sleep better. Definitely, I will.”
Two other videos were also taken of the crash by two terrestrial telescopes. The Hawaiian Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (opens in new tab) and one of Las Cumbres Observatory’s (opens in new tab) South African telescopes both captured videos of the impact — showing a bright puff of dust and rubble plume from Dimorphos at the moment of impact.
These won’t be the only telescopes put to use to study the impact. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope, and the agency’s Lucy spacecraft will also train their lenses on the asteroid to study the impact’s aftermath. Their observations will help scientists understand how much force is needed to successfully divert an asteroid from our planet.
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