OK – you might think I’m over-egging this – after all, these are all variations of the same stereo view, of the binary Asteroid system recently targeted by the NASA DART mission. But because of the strange circumstances surrounding this encounter, this stereo is almost certainly the best view of Didymos we will see for a very long time. If all had gone according to the original plan, the high-power European Space Agency spacecraft HERA would have arrived at this location, had lots of time to survey these two fascinating rocks before the DART mission smashed into the tiny Dimorphos, and then been on site to send us on-the-spot updates on the effects of the impact. But since HERA was delayed (around 4 years) none of this happened. The only reason we have these epic pictures is because a tiny Italian craft – LICIAcube – hitched a ride on DART and, alone after the event, was able to send back these historic pictures. Big nod to Claudia Manzoni – for extracting this great stereo – in which Didymos resembles a giant chocolate chip cookie !
But the biggest news here is the enormous cone of debris emanating from the hapless Dimorphos, which seems to have been massively disrupted by the man-made impact.
Bri