DART: The asteroid bombarded by NASA got a comet-like tail

The asteroid graceful in it bumped into Fantastically fast her DART boat NASA It now leaves behind a 10,000 kilometer cloud of debris.

The stunning image, taken two days after the collision with the SOAR telescope in Chile, resembles a comet leaving a trail of particles and dust as it approaches the sun.

But unlike comets, which are mostly made up of ice, the asteroid Demorphos is made up of dust and rock.

Cosmic billiards game

Last week, the DART spacecraft collided with Dimorphos at 6.6 kilometers per hour to see if the asteroid’s orbit could be altered.

The Cosmic Billiards test was essentially a rehearsal for the possibility that a large asteroid in the future could be on a collision course with Earth.

One of the last images of Demorphos transmitted by DART before the impact (NASA)

Fragments ejected during impact are accelerated by the solar wind (particles are constantly emitted from the sun) and thus spread over a great distance.

The tail will continue to grow longer and thinner until it is finally undetectable.

“At this point, the asteroid’s material will be like the rest of the dust stuck in the solar system,” he said. News agency Matthew Knight of the United States Office of Naval Research, who provided the final notes.

Wait a few weeks

Demorphos is about 160 meters wide, orbiting a larger space rock, the asteroid Gemini, 780 meters in diameter.

It will be several weeks before it is determined if the effect actually caused Dimorphos to go off track.

NASA hopes the impact will change the Dimorph’s velocity by less than a millimeter per second and will subtly affect the rock’s orbit around the larger Dimorph, reducing the orbital period by about 10 minutes per hour.

A small Italian-made device, called the LiciaCube, was launched from the craft a few days ago to record the impact and its ramifications.

NASA chose Gemini and Dimorpho because this binary system provides ideal conditions for measuring change in velocity – if Dimorpho orbited the Sun alone, the change would be too small to measure from Earth.