The first images of DART’s asteroid crash captured by NASA’s LICIACube show impact and debris

After NASA‘s DART spacecraft successfully completed its first planetary defense test last night, the tiny Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) spacecraft captured the moment in its messy glory.

The Italian space agency released a series of images this afternoon that show a before-and-after comparison of the Didymos asteroid system and a bright burst of debris surrounding Dimorphos.

LICIACube is tiny, contains two optical cameras and weighs about 31 pounds. The small spacecraft hitched a ride with DART, which deployed the cubesat on Sept. 11, and is operated from a mission control center in Turin, Italy.

‘We’re really very proud,’ Elisabetta Dotto, science team lead at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), said during a news conference held in Italian on Tuesday. 

The images will help researchers gain a better understanding of Dimorphos’ structure and composition, Dotto explained, noting that there will be more images released in the coming days. 

In the last image, Dimorphos is blanketed by bright and hazy debris. 

‘Dimorphos is completely covered really by this by this emission of dust and detritus produced by the impact,’ Dotto said, according to Space.com. 

On Monday, the LICIACube stayed at a safe distance as DART zoomed into its target, but then performed a perfectly timed drive-by past the impact site a few minutes later. 

The small but mighty craft is now conducting Italy’s first deep-space mission and will continue to beam images back to Earth. 

NASA’s DART mission slammed into Dimorphos, a smaller space rock circling a larger asteroid called Didymos, to see if it could throw off the orbit of a potential future asteroid that was threatening life on Earth. Scientists will be watching the Didymos system closely to see how much Dimorphos’ orbit actually changed – those results won’t come for at least another two months. 

Confirmation of NASA’s successful planetary defense test came seconds after the 7:14 ET (00:14 BST) 14,000 mph collision, sparking applause among the ground team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. ‘Impact success!’ NASA tweeted after the DART spacecraft collided with the 560 foot asteroid, around 6.7 million miles away from Earth. 

By striking Dimorphos head on, NASA hopes it pushed it into a smaller orbit, shaving 10 minutes off the time it takes to circle Didymos, which is currently 11 hours and 55 minutes. 

The space probe used what is called kinetic impact, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an approaching near-earth object. 

Such a mission may evoke memories of a Hollywood disaster movie such as Armageddon, but this is very much real and could save Earth from colliding with a deadly space rock.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated the DART team shortly after the mission was completed, highlighting how the successful test could one day save humanity.

‘We are showing that planetary defense is a global endeavor, and it is very possible to save our planet,’ Nelson said.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX also applauded NASA on the successful mission.

‘Congratulations on successfully crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid,’ the billionaire entrepreneur’s company said in its tweet. 

The US space agency’s staff cheered and clapped in a video shared online as the vending machine-sized spacecraft successfully smashed into Dimorphos, which is the size of a football stadium.

‘And we have impact. A triumph for humanity in the name of planetary defense,’ a member of NASA’s team said in a video recorded in the control room as the collision took place.

The asteroid’s bread bun shape and rocky surface finally came into clear view in the last few minutes as DART raced toward it.

‘Woo hoo,’ exclaimed Johns Hopkins mission systems engineer Elena Adams. ‘We’re seeing Dimorphos, so wonderful, wonderful.’

With an image beaming back to Earth every second, Adams and other ground controllers in Laurel, Maryland, watched with growing excitement as Dimorphos loomed larger and larger in the field of view alongside its bigger companion. 

As the craft propelled itself autonomously for the mission’s final four hours like a self-guided missile, its imager started to beam down the very first pictures of Dimorphos, before slamming into its surface.

The closer DART got, the more detailed the asteroid appeared and the last shot was an up-close image of the asteroid’s rocky surface – before the screen went black.

In a live question-and-answer session after the crash, senior leaders from NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory said the mission was ‘straight down the middle’ and nothing went wrong. 

Engineers said DART is completely destroyed, but there might be pieces of it in the crater it left during impact – and some of the team said they shed a tear knowing the craft is now gone.

Adams said the craft landed 55 feet from the targeted landing site, but still enough to assume it was a success.

‘It was basically a bullseye. I think, as far as we can tell, the first planetary defense test was a success, and we can clap to that,’ she said in a post-mission press conference. 

‘Earthlings should sleep better, and I definitely will.’  

A toaster-sized satellite called LICIACube, which already separated from DART a few weeks ago, made a close pass of the site to capture images of the collision and the ejecta – the pulverized rock thrown off by impact. 

DART launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last November, which was called NASA’s ‘Armageddon moment’. 

DART ‘is something of a replay of Bruce Willis’s movie, “Armageddon”, although that was totally fictional,’ Nelson said in a November interview referring the 1998 film that saw teams travel to an asteroid heading to Earth with the hopes of destroying it before impact.

Didymos and Dimorphos are currently making their closest approach to Earth in years, passing at a distance of about 6.7 million miles from our planet.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is launching a mission in 2024 that will send a probe to Dimorphos and Didymos to study the pair in greater detail. 

An asteroid the size of Dimorphos could cause a continent-wide destruction on Earth, while the impact of one the size of the larger Didymos would be felt worldwide.

NASA emphasized that the asteroids in question pose no threat to our home planet, but were chosen because they can be observed from ground-based telescopes here on Earth.

Andy Rivkin, of JPL’s ‘s applied physics laboratory, and Dart investigation team lead, said Monday that the two asteroids are perfect to test this planetary defense test. 

‘We needed something with a moon that was small enough that we could move it with a strike from a from a spacecraft, but not so small that we wrecked the moon,’ Rivkin continued. 

‘So when you kind of tick off all the possibilities, Didymos ended up as the best choice, and really the only choice, that would provide a mission in this time period.’

Telescopes were also watching and studying from afar, including NASA’s new $10 billion James Webb observatory, while DART will also return images to Earth at the rate of one per second as it heads towards its ‘deep impact’.

The theory is that if an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, you would only need to change its velocity by a small amount to alter its path so that it misses us, provided this was done far enough in advance.

Rome-based Virtual Telescope Project has also teamed up with several observatories in South Africa, and will be showing the target asteroid in real-time at the moment of the scheduled impact.

The change in the orbital period will be measured by telescopes on Earth. The minimum change for the mission to be considered a success is 73 seconds.

The DART technique could prove useful for altering the course of an asteroid years or decades before it bears down on Earth with the potential for catastrophe.

NASA considers any near-Earth object ‘potentially hazardous’ if it comes within 0.05 astronomical units (4.6 million miles) and measures more than 460 feet in diameter.

More than 27,000 near-Earth asteroids have been cataloged but none currently pose a danger to our planet.