The Hubble Space Telescope captured the site of an Earth defense experiment. On the 2nd of local time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a video of the ‘Twin Asteroid Orbit Correction Experiment (DART · Dart)’ taken by the Hubble Telescope.
Dart is an earth defense experiment that changes the course of an asteroid by crashing a spaceship into it. The Dart spacecraft launched in November 2021 collided with ‘Dimorphos’ in September 2022. Dimorphos is an asteroid with a diameter of 160 m and a satellite orbiting the asteroid Didymos. “After the dart impact, Dimorphos’ orbital period was shortened by more than 30 minutes,” NASA Director Bill Nelson said. “NASA has shown the world that it is serious as a planetary guardian.”
The Hubble Telescope started filming Dart and Dimorphos even before they collided. It captured a wider range of collisions than the Italian Space Agency’s CubeSat ‘LICIACube’. First, the dust and debris from the impact receded in a cone shape. After 17 hours of impact, it formed a tail behind the Dimorphos, and after a few weeks, the tail split in two. NASA attributed these changes to the debris pattern to Didymos’s gravitational pull.
NASA also analyzed that the dart and Dimorphos’ collision scattered more than 1,000 tons of dust and rocks into space. “This experiment was conducted on a pair of asteroids, and this is the first time we’ve seen an object collide with an asteroid in a twin asteroid system in real time,” NASA said. It will take,” he said.
Meanwhile, recently, private satellites are increasingly blocking the view of the Hubble Telescope. The New York Times (NYT) reported on the 2nd that an increasing number of Hubble telescope photos are unusable due to the light or trajectory of artificial satellites. In particular, SpaceX’s satellite internet service ‘Starlink’, which is 16 km higher than the Hubble telescope, is considered the main culprit.
We look forward to seeing what kind of cosmic images the Hubble Telescope will capture in the future.
Source = Media Bamboo
Summary = Reporter Kim Hyun-ki [email protected]