![]() Before this mission, researchers had little idea how Dimorphos looked - it could have been anything from a collection of rubble to a single large rock. Throughout this phase, the spacecraft clicked one image every second, including a picture of its impact site, a patch of Dimorphos covering 9,472 square feet (880 square m) - the last thing it sent home 1.8 seconds before plunging between two large boulders on the asteroid as planned.ĭART approached Dimorphos at a 73-degree angle and had its solar arrays slightly slanted, so the probe ended up grazing one of the boulders just before impact. That image showed Dimorphos' surface to be strewn with boulders, similar to rubble-pile asteroids like Ikotawa, Bennu or Ryugu.Ībout 2.5 minutes prior to crashing, the DART probe stopped maneuvering to settle down and reduce jitters and smear in its final images, researchers noted in one of the five new studies. "It was amazing to see it for the first time - no one had ever acquired a resolved image of Dimorphos before," Ernst said. The mission team already knew that Dimorphos would be hidden from the spacecraft's view for much of this time, so they kept DART moving toward Didymos until it was able to detect Dimorphos, the smaller and dimmer of the two - which it did 73 minutes prior to slamming into it, researchers say. A month prior to its impact, the DART probe began sending home pictures once every five hours, which were processed by a ground optical navigation team, researchers report in the new papers.Ībout four hours before impact, researchers handed over control to DART and allowed it to navigate itself using its autonomous SMART Nav system, which also processed images onboard to first identify Didymos and later Dimorphos.
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