Hubble Space Talescope Gallary

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About This Image

This Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on December 19, 2022, nearly four months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA's DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). Hubble’s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision. These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the solar system. The free-flung boulders range in size from three feet to 22 feet across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at a little more than a half-mile per hour. The discovery yields invaluable insights into the behavior of a small asteroid when it is hit by a projectile for the purpose of altering its trajectory.

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About This Image

This is the last complete image of the asteroid Dimorphos, as seen by NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) impactor spacecraft two seconds before impact. The Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) imager aboard captured a 100-foot-wide patch of the asteroid. The DART spacecraft streamed these images from its DRACO camera back to Earth in real time as it approached the asteroid. DART successfully impacted its target on September 26, 2022.

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About This Image

Image of the asteroid Dimorphos, with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above). The bright white object at lower left is Dimorphos. It has a bluish dust tail extending diagonally to the upper right. A cluster of blue dots (marked by white circles) surrounds the asteroid. These are boulders that were knocked off the asteroid when, on September 26, 2022, NASA deliberately slammed the half-ton DART impactor spacecraft into the asteroid as a test of what it would take to deflect some future asteroid from hitting Earth. Hubble photographed the slow-moving boulders using the Wide Field Camera 3 in December 2022. The color results from assigning a blue hue to the monochromatic (grayscale) image.

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About This Image

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the globular star cluster, Messier 4. The cluster is a dense collection of several hundred thousand stars. Astronomers suspect that an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun, is lurking, unseen, at its core.

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