The photograph was obtained thanks to a Chilean telescope and shows a trail of debris from DART of up to 10 thousand kilometers.
Last week, NASA made history by crashing the DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in an attempt to change its orbit.
Since that date, the captures of such an impressive event have begun to appear , the first in our history, with telescopes from all over the world as the protagonist. And from Chile, one takes the prize for greater details.
A trail of debris
The latest images come from the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope located in Chile.
In his images, captured from the Andes, you can see how the impact leaves a trail of up to 10 thousand kilometers from the point of collision.
“It’s amazing how clearly we were able to capture the structure and extent of the aftermath in the days after the impact,” says Teddy Kareta, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who was involved in this observation.
Still a lot of research
The images captured by the different observatories both on Earth and in space are revealing greater details of the composition of Dimorphos.
However, NASA scientists are still investigating the main question: whether the DART impact actually changed the asteroid’s orbit within the Didymos binary system.
Also, more findings about the mission will be published soon: exactly how much material was ejected from the star, what state that material was in, and how quickly it might have been ejected.