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In the Jupiter campaign, scientists wanted to see how the comet collisions affected the Jovian aurorae, rapid and irregular displays of colorful light in a planet's night sky caused by the leakage of charged particles from the magnetosphere into the atmosphere. Following the impacts, some of the resulting debris became electrically charged and traveled along Jupiter's magnetic field lines and created new aurorae in Jupiter's northern hemisphere, as shown in this image. Scientists had never before observed aurorae this far south of where aurorae are typically seen in Jupiter's northern hemisphere.

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    • By NASA
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      Last Updated Sep 02, 2025 Related Terms
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      Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
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      NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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      Last Updated Aug 29, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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      Last Updated Aug 21, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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    • By NASA
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      Photos taken by the Italian LICIACube, short for the LICIA Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids. These offer the closest, most detailed observations of NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) impact aftermath to date. The photo on the left was taken roughly 2 minutes and 40 seconds after impact, as the satellite flew past the Didymos system. The photo on the right was taken 20 seconds later, as LICIACube was leaving the scene. The larger body, near the top of each image is Didymos. The smaller body in the lower half of each image is Dimorphos, enveloped by the cloud of rocky debris created by DART’s impact. NASA/ASI/University of Maryland On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million miles away.
       
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      “The plume of material released from the asteroid was like a short burst from a rocket engine,” said Ramin Lolachi, a research scientist who led the study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
       
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      The tail of material that formed behind Dimorphos was prominent almost 12 days after the DART impact, giving the asteroid a comet-like appearance, as seen in this image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in October 2022. Hubble’s observations were made from roughly 6.8 million miles away. NASA, ESA, STScI, Jian-Yang Li (PSI); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale DART’s Star Witness
      NASA chose Dimorphos, which poses no threat to Earth, as the mission target due to its relationship with another, larger asteroid named Didymos. Dimorphos orbits Didymos in a binary asteroid system, much like the Moon orbits Earth. Critically, the pair’s position relative to Earth allowed astronomers to measure the duration of the moonlet’s orbit before and after the collision.
       
      Ground and space-based observations revealed that DART shortened Dimorphos’ orbit by 33 minutes. But these long-range observations, made from 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) away, were too distant to support a detailed study of the impact debris. That was LICIACube’s job.
      After DART’s impact, LICIACube had just 60 seconds to make its most critical observations. Barreling past the asteroid at 15,000 miles (21,140 kilometers) per hour, the spacecraft took a snapshot of the debris roughly once every three seconds. Its closest image was taken just 53 miles (85.3 km) from Dimorphos’ surface.
       
      The short distance between LICIACube and Dimorphos provided a unique advantage, allowing the cubesat to capture detailed images of the dusty debris from multiple angles.
       
      The research team studied a series of 18 LICIAcube images. The first images in the sequence showed LICIACube’s head-on approach. From this angle, the plume was brightly illuminated by direct sunlight. As the spacecraft glided past the asteroid, its camera pivoted to keep the plume in view.
      This animated series of images was taken by a camera aboard LICIACube 2 to 3 minutes after DART crashed into Dimorphos. As LICIACube made its way past the binary pair of asteroids Didymos, the larger one on top, and Dimorphos, the object at the bottom. The satellite’s viewing angle changed rapidly during its flyby of Dimorphos, allowing scientists o get a comprehensive view of the impact plume from a series of angles. ASI/University of Maryland/Tony Farnham/Nathan Marder  As LICIACube looked back at the asteroid, sunlight filtered through the dense cloud of debris, and the plume’s brightness faded. This suggested the plume was made of mostly large particles — about a millimeter or more across — which reflect less light than tiny dust grains.
      Since the innermost parts of the plume were so thick with debris that they were completely opaque, the scientists used models to estimate the number of particles that were hidden from view. Data from other rubble-pile asteroids, including pieces of Bennu delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, and laboratory experiments helped refine the estimate.
       
      “We estimated that this hidden material accounted for almost 45% of the plume’s total mass,” said Timothy Stubbs, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard who was involved with the study.
       
      While DART showed that a high-speed collision with a spacecraft can change an asteroid’s trajectory, Stubbs and his colleagues note that different asteroid types, such as those made of stronger, more tightly packed material, might respond differently to a DART-like impact. “Every time we interact with an asteroid, we find something that surprises us, so there’s a lot more work to do,” said Stubbs. “But DART is a big step forward for planetary defense.”
       
      The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, managed the DART mission and operated the spacecraft for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office.
       
      By Nathan Marder, nathan.marder@nasa.gov
      NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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      Last Updated Aug 21, 2025 Related Terms
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