SCIENCE:
NASA, ESA, CSA, Cristina
Thomas
(Northern Arizona University), Ian
Wong
(NASA-GSFC)
IMAGE PROCESSING:
Joseph
DePasquale
(STScI)
This image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument shows Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos, about 4 hours after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) made impact. A tight, compact core and plumes of material appearing as wisps streaming away from the center of where the impact took place, are visible in the image. Those sharp points are Webb’s distinctive eight diffraction spikes , an artifact of the telescope’s structure.
These observations, when combined with data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, will allow scientists to gain knowledge about the nature of the surface of Dimorphos, how much material was ejected by the collision, and how fast it was ejected.
In the coming months, scientists will use Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to observe ejecta from Dimorphos further. Spectroscopic data will also provide researchers with insight into the asteroid’s chemical composition.
The observations shown here were conducted in the filter F070W (0.7 microns) and assigned the color red.
NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.