The Hubble Space Telescope monitors an unexpected impact of a NASA mission colliding with the asteroid Demorphos

by time news
A week or two after NASA’s DART spacecraft hit the asteroid Demorphos, scientists discovered something unexpected: the space rock developed a “double tail”.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission expanded to hit a small asteroid called “Dimorphos”, on September 26, in order to test a potential technology to protect Earth from an asteroid on a collision course with our planet.

Within two days, radiative pressure from the Sun pushed debris from the collision to form a comet-like tail about 6,000 miles (10,000 km) long.

But now a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is emerging that “Demorphos” produced not one tail, but two tails, a development that NASA scientists described as “unexpected.”

NASA and the European Space Agency released a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope on Thursday, October 20, showing that the asteroid Demorphos, the smaller and fainter object in the Demorvos-Didymos double system, has developed a double tail, which is seen as two bands extending back From a bright ball of light in blue.

The NASA statement indicated that the second tail developed sometime between October 2 and October 8. Hubble has observed the asteroid 18 times since the collision.

Astronomers point out that they’ve previously observed double tails forming in comets, so the evolution isn’t entirely a surprise. However, scientists are still not sure exactly how the second tail formed, according to NASA.

The fact that Dimorphos lost enough material to form such a large tail reflects the severity of the impact. The main goal of the DART mission was to measure the collision time from Demorphos’ orbit around a larger asteroid called Didymos. The mission aimed to shorten the orbit, which was originally 11 hours and 55 minutes, by 73 seconds. Before arriving, scientists estimated that the change could reach tens of minutes. According to the scientists supervising the mission, the orbit was shortened by 32 minutes, following the collision.

(Russia Today)

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