Light curves and colours of the ejecta from Dimorphos after the DART impact

Abstract

On 26 September 2022, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft struck Dimorphos, a satellite of the asteroid 65803 Didymos1. Because it is a binary system, it is possible to determine how much the orbit of the satellite changed, as part of a test of what is necessary to deflect an asteroid that might threaten Earth with an impact. In nominal cases, pre-impact predictions of the orbital period reduction ranged from roughly 8.8 to 17 min (refs. 2,3). Here we report optical observations of Dimorphos before, during and after the impact, from a network of citizen scientists’ telescopes across the world. We find a maximum brightening of 2.29 ± 0.14 mag on impact. Didymos fades back to its pre-impact brightness over the course of 23.7 ± 0.7 days. We estimate lower limits on the mass contained in the ejecta, which was 0.3–0.5% Dimorphos’s mass depending on the dust size. We also observe a reddening of the ejecta on impact.