A week or two after NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into the asteroid Demorphos, scientists discovered something unexpected: the space rock developed a “double tail,” reports RT.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission extended to a small asteroid called Demorphos on September 26 to test potential technology to protect Earth from an asteroid on a collision course with our planet.
Over the course of two days, the Sun’s radiative pressure pushed the debris from the collision to form a comet-like tail about 10,000 kilometers long.
But now a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows that the “Demorphos” produced not one, but two tails, a development that NASA scientists have called “unexpected”.
On Thursday, October 20, NASA and the European Space Agency released a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing that the asteroid Demorphos, the smallest and faintest object in the Demorvos-Didymos binary system, has developed a double tail that looks like two bands. Reaching back from a brilliant blue sphere of light.
The second tail developed between October 2 and October 8, the NASA statement said, with Hubble observing the asteroid 18 times since the collision.
Astronomers point out that they have already observed the formation of double tails in comets, so the evolution is not entirely surprising. However, according to NASA, scientists are still not sure how exactly the second tail formed.
The fact that Demorphos lost enough material to form such a large tail reflects the severity of the impact.The main goal of the DART mission was to measure the timing of the collision from Demorphos’ orbit around a larger asteroid called Didymos.
The mission’s goal was to shorten the orbit, which was originally 11 hours and 55 minutes, by 73 seconds, and scientists had estimated prior to their arrival that the change could reach tens of minutes and, according to scientists overseeing the mission, the orbit. been blamed. Within 32 minutes of impact.
