On September 26, 2022, NASA's first planetary defense experiment, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, successfully performed an impact experiment on Dimorphos, the secondary asteroid, of the Didymos binary asteroid system . With a spacecraft mass of 579 kg impacting the 151 m equivalent diameter asteroid at a speed of 6.14 km/s, this impact is comparable to the natural impacts occurring on asteroids, providing us with a unique opportunity to study the asteroidal impact process and the fate of the ejecta. As part of the worldwide observing campaign to monitor the impact, we imaged the ejecta with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) starting one hour before the DART impact with observations continuing for the next 18.5 days at pixel scales of ~2.1 km at the asteroid. The data revealed a complex and unique dynamic evolution of the ejected dust under the gravitational interaction with the binary system and solar radiation pressure (SRP), ultimately forming a dust tail similar to the tails observed to evolve from active asteroids thought to be triggered by natural impacts (e.g., ).
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF DIMORPHOS'S EJECTA CREATED BY THE DART IMPACT
A Rossi;
2023-01-01
Abstract
On September 26, 2022, NASA's first planetary defense experiment, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, successfully performed an impact experiment on Dimorphos, the secondary asteroid, of the Didymos binary asteroid system . With a spacecraft mass of 579 kg impacting the 151 m equivalent diameter asteroid at a speed of 6.14 km/s, this impact is comparable to the natural impacts occurring on asteroids, providing us with a unique opportunity to study the asteroidal impact process and the fate of the ejecta. As part of the worldwide observing campaign to monitor the impact, we imaged the ejecta with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) starting one hour before the DART impact with observations continuing for the next 18.5 days at pixel scales of ~2.1 km at the asteroid. The data revealed a complex and unique dynamic evolution of the ejected dust under the gravitational interaction with the binary system and solar radiation pressure (SRP), ultimately forming a dust tail similar to the tails observed to evolve from active asteroids thought to be triggered by natural impacts (e.g., ).I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
