The asteroid that got smacked by a NASA spacecraft is now being trailed by thousands of miles of debris from the impact.
This image made available by NOIRLab shows a plume of dust and debris blasted from the surface of the asteroid Dimorphos by NASA's DART spacecraft after it impacted on Sept. 26, 2022, captured by the U.S. National Science Foundation's NOIRLab's SOAR telescope in Chile. The expanding, comet-like tail is more than 6,000 miles long. Astronomers captured the scene millions of miles away with a telescope in Chile.
This plume is accelerating away from the harmless asteroid, in large part, because of pressure on it from solar radiation, said Matthew Knight of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, who made the observation along with Lowell Observatory's Teddy Kareta using the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope.
“At that point, the material will be like any other dust floating around the solar system," Knight said in an email Tuesday.
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