A 'swarm of boulders' was sent careening into space after NASA successfully disrupted the orbit of an asteroid last year, according to the space agency.
The boulders range in size from three feet to 22 feet across and are drifting away from the asteroid at about half a mile per hour.
The bright white object at lower left is the asteroid Dimorphos, with a bluish dust tail extending diagonally to the upper right. A cluster of blue dots around the asteroid are boulders knocked off the asteroid when, on Sept. 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.
"We've seen other examples of impact between one asteroid and another and the trouble there is we don't know when the impact occurred," Jewitt said. "We see the debris but at some uncertain time after the impact, so the interpretation is clouded by not knowing when it happened, not knowing how big or how energetic the two asteroids were when they collided and so on, so it's not very well characterized.
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