The world’s two most powerful telescopes, James Webb Telescope and Hubble Telescope, have captured the impact of NASA’s asteroid.
The success of NASA’s DART mission seems to have excited everyone on the internet. And it should! As an official NASA siad, it has given Earthlings relief from the threat of potentially dangerous asteroids. While the US space agency has already shared the scenes of the historic moment, the world’s most powerful telescopes, James Webb Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have also captured the moment, revealing the first images of Thursday’s Dart Mission Asteroid attack. Not only is this a special moment for NASA as it has created the history of a spacecraft crashing into an asteroid, but this is also the first time that both telescopes have observed the same celestial body at the same time.
The DART mission was tested on asteroid Dimorphous. Images captured by the telescopes showed a huge cloud of dust expanding from Dimorphos and Didymos when the spacecraft collided with them.
James Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the images four hours after the DART spacecraft hit the target asteroid. The image shows “plumes of material appearing as wisps flowing away from the center of the impact,” shared by the European Space Agency, James Webb and Hubble in a joint statement. The images captured by James Webb’s images are red because the telescope operates primarily in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to look deeper into the universe than ever before.
On the other hand, the images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 appeared in blue because it showed the impact in visible light. Hubble captured the moment 22 minutes, five hours and eight hours after the impact. It shows the expanding nebula of matter from where DART impacted to the left of the asteroid.
Meanwhile, the moments captured by LICIACube – a small Italian satellite that flew just behind DART – show a large plume of dust coming off the target asteroid after DART collided with it, as the cloud of rocks and other debris quickly spread upwards. LICIACube captured the impact after 3 minutes of DART hitting the Dimorphous. The first images were released on September 27 by the Italian space agency.
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