When a NASA spacecraft successfully knocked an asteroid off course last year it sent dozens of boulders skittering into space, images from the Hubble telescope showed on Thursday.
When a NASA spacecraft successfully knocked an asteroid off course last year it sent dozens of boulders skittering into space, images from the Hubble telescope showed on Thursday.
NASA’s fridge-sized DART probe smashed into the pyramid-sized, rugby ball-shaped asteroid Dimorphos roughly 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth in September last year.
The spacecraft knocked the asteroid significantly off course in the first-ever such test of Earth’s planetary defenses.
New images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show that the collision also sent 37 boulders—ranging from one meter (three feet) to seven meters (22 feet) across—floating into the cosmos.
