DART Mission Shows that Dimorphos Has No Water-Ice Written 22 March 2023

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This illustration depicts NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft prior to impact at the Didymos binary asteroid system. | Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben

SPACE reports that six months following the DART mission slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid, Dimorphos has given NASA scientists time to clarify a profile of the asteroid. Careful scrutiny of the debris “from the impact of NASA’s DART mission into Dimorphos has not found any evidence for water-ice on the asteroid, nor the residue of thruster fuel from the spacecraft, new results from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) show.” However, the data from the MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) “instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile does indicate differences in the size of particles in the debris, and show how the polarization of the light from the asteroid changed.”
Full Story (SPACE)