PARIS: The asteroid is flying through space in the grainy black and white video, when suddenly a massive cloud of debris sprays out in front of it, meaning only one thing: impact.

Astronomers have hailed this early footage of the first time humanity deliberately smashed a spacecraft, Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor, into an asteroid, saying it looks like it did a “lot of damage”.

While Dimorphos is 11 million kilometres away and poses no threat to Earth, it is being used as a historic test run so the world can be ready to defend itself if a future astroid heads Earth’s way. After the impact, ground-based telescopes and the toaster-sized satellite LICIACube, which separated from DART a few weeks ago, revealed the first images of the collision.

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2022