On the night of 26 and 27 September, the NASA DART spacecraft successfully encountered the asteroid Dimorph, a 160-metre-long satellite orbiting the larger asteroid Didim, and about 38 seconds after the crash, the transmission from the ship was interrupted.
Researchers now publish photos and videos taken during ground-based observations and from other spacecraft, such as astronomers on a small part of our planet, ranging from South and East Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula, could observe it live in their telescopes.
The European Space Agency presented a video of the impact that was received by the Les Maces observatory team on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, showing that the asteroid immediately started to shine when it hit, and a few seconds later it became more visible, and less than a minute later, a cloud of discarded material became visible and could be monitored while it drifted eastward and slowly dispersed.
The first photographs were also taken from the camera installed on the tiny LUCIAcube satellite, a 6-seat cube developed by the Italian Space Agency, which, about a week before the crash, separated itself from the DART, but followed it to observe the collision.
In the coming days and weeks, astronomers around the world will work to confirm whether the asteroid's trajectory was completely altered as a result of the impact, and earlier, Hytech told us how the DART mission went and how astronomers would continue to evaluate its results.