Abstract in atti di convegno, 2023, ENG

HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF DIMORPHOS'S EJECTA CREATED BY THE DART IMPACT

Jian-Yang Li, M. Hirabayashi, T.L. Farnham, J.M. Sunshine, M.M. Knight, G. Tancredi, F. Moreno, B. Murphy, C. Opitom, S. Chesley, H.A. Weaver, D.J. Scheeres, C.A. Thomas, E.G. Fahnestock, A.F. Cheng, A.S. Rivkin, F. Ferrari, A. Rossi, J.M. Trigo-Rodríguez, and the DART Investigation Team

Planetary Science Institute, USA; Auburn University, USA; Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland at College Park, USA; United States Naval Academy, USA; Departamento de Astronomía, Facultad de Ciencias, Udelar, Uruguay; Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, CSIC, Spain; University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, UK; Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA; Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA; University of Colorado, USA; Northern Arizona University, USA; Department of Aerospace Science and Technology; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; IFAC-CNR, Italy; Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC), Spain.

On September 26, 2022, NASA's first planetary defense experiment, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, successfully performed an impact experiment on Dimorphos, the secondary asteroid, of the Didymos binary asteroid system . With a spacecraft mass of 579 kg impacting the 151 m equivalent diameter asteroid at a speed of 6.14 km/s, this impact is comparable to the natural impacts occurring on asteroids, providing us with a unique opportunity to study the asteroidal impact process and the fate of the ejecta. As part of the worldwide observing campaign to monitor the impact, we imaged the ejecta with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) starting one hour before the DART impact with observations continuing for the next 18.5 days at pixel scales of ~2.1 km at the asteroid. The data revealed a complex and unique dynamic evolution of the ejected dust under the gravitational interaction with the binary system and solar radiation pressure (SRP), ultimately forming a dust tail similar to the tails observed to evolve from active asteroids thought to be triggered by natural impacts (e.g., ).

54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), The Woodlands, TX, USA, 13-17/03/2023

Keywords

DART mission, LICIACube mission, Near Earth Asteroids

CNR authors

Rossi Alessandro

CNR institutes

IFAC – Istituto di fisica applicata "Nello Carrara"

ID: 479770

Year: 2023

Type: Abstract in atti di convegno

Creation: 2023-03-30 16:29:11.000

Last update: 2023-07-04 11:32:53.000

CNR authors

External IDs

CNR OAI-PMH: oai:it.cnr:prodotti:479770