Hubble photographs boulders flung off asteroid Dimorphos | Credit: NASA
UCLA EPSS professor and planetary scientist David Jewitt has used the Hubble Space Telescope’s extraordinary sensitivity to discover a swam of 37 boulders potentially shaken off the Dimorphos asteroid during NASA’s DART mission. The 2022 mission saw NASA deliberately slam the “half-ton DART impactor spacecraft into Dimorphos at approximately 14,000 miles per hour” (NASA).
“This is a spectacular observation – much better than I expected. We see a cloud of boulders carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos by the impact,” said Jewitt, who has been utilizing Hubble to track changes in the asteroid during and after the DART impact. “This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes. The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system.”
See the complete NASA press release here: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-008
Read Jewitt’s paper here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ace1ec