Massive Debris Field Formed by DART Asteroid Impact

NASA's DART mission successfully shifted the orbit of an asteroid, but it also created a debris field of boulders. Analysis of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed dozens of boulders that collectively made up 0.1 percent of the mass of the target asteroid. Some of these boulders are slowly moving away from the collision site and have the potential to escape the gravity of the double asteroid system. The boulders, estimated to be 4-7 meters across, carry about 0.1 percent of the pre-collision mass of the asteroid. The kinetic energy carried away by these rocks is only 0.003 percent of the energy delivered by DART. The findings suggest that the target asteroid was a rubble pile composed of pre-shattered rocks, and DART simply liberated some of them. Further study will be conducted by the European Space Agency's HERA probe in three years.