When a probe smashed into a small asteroid last year, the collision did more than change the asteroid’s orbit — it blasted a few dozen hefty boulders into space too.
Last September, NASA steered the DART spacecraft into Dimorphos, a moonlet of the larger asteroid Didymos, to test a strategy for knocking any future Earth-bound asteroids off course (SN: 10/11/22). About three months after the impact, the Hubble Space Telescope spied a halo of 37 previously unseen objects accompanying the space rock duo in their orbit around the sun, researchers report in the July 21 Astrophysical Journal Letters.
