Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft smashed into space body last September, 11m km away from Earth
Brian Murphy, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of one of the two studies reporting the observations, said: “Asteroids are some of the most basic relics of what all the planets and moons in our solar system were created from.”
“Impacts between asteroids happen naturally, but you never know it in advance,” added Cyrielle Opitom, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh and lead author of one of the articles.Researchers followed the evolution of the cloud of debris for a month and found that the ejected cloud was bluer than the asteroid itself before the impact. They suggest this indicates the cloud could be made of very fine particles.
Dr Opitom explained: “Asteroids are not expected to contain significant amounts of ice, so detecting any trace of water would have been a real surprise.”Dr Opitom added: “We knew it was a long shot, as the amount of gas that would be left in the tanks from the propulsion system would not be huge.
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