One month after the NASA asteroid collision success, what have scientists learned?

On September 26, NASA made history! For the first time ever, humans were able to shake and actually move a celestial body. The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission sent a spacecraft to an asteroid called Dimorphos and struck it headfirst. The mission was conducted to find a reliable way to defend the Earth from any incoming asteroids. But a secondary objective was also to take a close look at the smallest asteroid any spacecraft has visited. So, what have the scientists found out after churning out the data for a month? Read on to find out.

Carolyn Ernst, a planetary scientist responsible for DART’s sole instrument told Space.com, “It’s been a thrill to see the data come in. Everybody’s been eagerly poring over them and busy working on them. There’s a lot of instant observations you can make, but there’s a lot of careful things you have to put together before you go too far down any road”. It is still early days and while it is easy to reach half baked conclusions based on the data, what these scientists are trying is to find the most conclusive evidence for any hypothesis they have regarding the asteroid and the spacecraft crash.

NASA reveals information from the DART mission

There was certain information scientists knew even before they began the mission. For instance, Dimorphos is part of a two asteroid system and is the smaller one of the two. As a result it orbits the larger Didymos. While Dimorphos is about 160-meter wide, Didymos spread 780-meters across.

There was information which NASA gathered about the asteroid during the flight of the spacecraft as well. In the last ten minutes before the crash, the cameras on the spacecraft were able to show what Dimorphos really looked like. Its rocky and uneven surface was filled with boulders and dust. It could also be seen that instead of being a solid rocky mass, it was filled with rubble.

“Because it looks so rubbly and because of what we know of those other asteroids, I think a lot of people imagine that it is sort of a rubble pile or kind of a loosely held-together collection of rocks,” said Ernst.

However, anything beyond the surface of the asteroid could not be analyzed and hence scientists do not know what the innards of the asteroid looks like.

Another crucial part of the puzzle is the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) satellite. It was a companion cubesat to the DART impactor which was equipped with cameras to take images after the spacecraft crashed. The LICIACube recently showed us the streams of rubble floating away from Dimorphos, giving it a comet-like appearance.

More information will pour in soon, with the LICIACube is collecting more data. Scientists were also able to collect data on Didymos as well as the long-term consequences of the crash. In 2024, European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its mission Hera which will travel to the asteroid and collect data on the long term impact from the crash.