Ejecta from the DART-produced active asteroid Dimorphos.

ABSTRACT: Some active asteroids have been proposed to be formed as a result of impact events¹. Because active asteroids are generally discovered by chance only after their tails have fully formed, the process of how impact ejecta evolve into a tail has, to our knowledge, not been directly observed. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission of NASA², in addition to having successfully changed the orbital period of Dimorphos³, demonstrated the activation process of an asteroid resulting from an impact under precisely known conditions. Here we report the observations of the DART impact ejecta with the Hubble Space Telescope from impact time T + 15 min to T + 18.5 days at spatial resolutions of around 2.1 km per pixel. Our observations reveal the complex evolut

SUBMITTER: Li JY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10115637 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature