NASA’s impact on Dimorphos released a group of rocks (pictured)

In September 2022, NASA’s DART mission blasted a rover into the asteroid Dimorpho to see if scientists could alter the course of an asteroid, with the ultimate goal of protecting Earth from an asteroid in its path.

now, New note, found a group of rocks around the asteroid, which were expelled by the collision. The new images will help scientists better understand the results of DART and plan similar missions more efficiently in the future.

This is a great note, much better than we had hoped. We see a cloud of rock carrying mass and energy away from the collision target. Their number, size and shape tell us how they came from the surface of Dimorphos after the impact. This reveals for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see the materials produced. These rocks are among the weakest objects we have ever discovered in our solar system. – David Jewett, a planetary scientist at the University of California

The DART experiment was an unprecedented success. Although Dimorphos remained in orbit around the larger Gemini asteroid, its 7.9-hour orbit shrank by 33 minutes, much longer than scientists thought, proving that kinetic deflection of the asteroid is possible. Scientists continue to monitor the asteroid to discover the long-term effects of the impact.

The Hubble telescope detected 37 rocks ranging in size from 1 to 6.7 meters, slowly moving away from the asteroid at a speed of one kilometer per hour. The Hera spacecraft will be launched in 2024 and will visit Dimorphos to study the impacts of the collision up close.

The group of rocks will likely continue to expand when Hera gets there. It’s like a very slowly expanding swarm of bees that will eventually expand into the orbit of the two asteroids around the sun.

You can download the image recorded by Hubble for wallpaper and see below, at a resolution of 2048 x 1536, from This link is here.

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