DART's Bullseye

Thanks Torry ! Really something out of this world , too cool !
 
Is it too early to know if it was a success?
They are now monitoring the orbit period of Dimorphos with ground based telescopes to determine what variance has occurred. Should know in a week or so they claim.

There should be more eye candy as well. The probe released a mini probe before its death dive which has cameras to observe main probes crash and ejecta spray.
 
Its interesting that the smaller Dimorphos was below resolution limits of any telescopes. So it had never been directly observed. It was only detected because the larger dIdymos was seen to dim in brightness every 11.5 days, indicating something was passing across between us and it. From that it was predicted there was a much smaller satellite/moon orbiting. Nice when predictions come out so perfectly.
 
Some follow up images from ground & space based observatories, including the little cam-bot DART released to record the smash:

 
Nudge, nudge!

"
Prior to DART’s impact, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. Since DART’s intentional collision with Dimorphos on Sept. 26, astronomers have been using telescopes on Earth to measure how much that time has changed. Now, the investigation team has confirmed the spacecraft’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, shortening the 11 hour and 55-minute orbit to 11 hours and 23 minutes. This measurement has a margin of uncertainty of approximately plus or minus 2 minutes
"
 
I was hoping some 'thing' was going to look up and run out of the way just before it struck :)
 
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