Webb and Hubble's telescopes reveal their first pics of DART impact

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released detailed views of the DART impact after James Webb and Hubble telescopes on Thursday revealed their first images of a spacecraft being smashed into an asteroid.

NASA recently celebrated the success of an experiment, which was the world's first-ever in-space test for planetary defence. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact aimed to deflect an asteroid that poses no threat to Earth. The process further modified the object's orbit.

Thespacerock Dimorphos helped people on Earth to build theability to defend themselves against a potential future life-threatening asteroid.

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Alan Fitzsimmons, who is an astronomer at Queen's University Belfast, said that the initial images showed matter spraying out over thousands of kilometres, and the James Webb and Hubble images "zoom in much closer".

Fitzsimmons is involved in observations with the ATLAS project. He said, "It really is quite spectacular." Notably, the observations from the space telescopes will help reveal how much matter sprayed from the asteroid, as well as the nature of its surface.

These observations are also the first time when Webb and Hubble simultaneously observed the same celestial target.

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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said, "Webb and Hubble show what we have always known to be true at NASA: We learn more when we work together."

Nelson said, "All of humanity eagerly awaits the discoveries to come from Webb, Hubble, and our ground-based telescopes – about the DART mission and beyond."

According to a joint statement from the European Space Agency, James Webb and Hubble, an image taken by James Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) four hours after impact shows "plumes of material appearing as wisps streaming away from the centre of where the impact took place".

James Webb's images were shown in red because the telescope operates primarily in the infrared spectrum, which allows it to peer further into the universe than ever before.

On the other hand, the images from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 were blue because it shows the impact on visible light.

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