The view from space…at a distance
Several space-based telescopes were tuned into the encounter, namely Hubble, Webb, and a camera mounted to NASA’s Lucy probe currently en route to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The image above was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope from the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, placing it some 6 million miles (9.7 million km) from Didymos. Astronomers used its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture this image, showing a “a tight, compact core, with plumes of material appearing as wisps
streaming away from the centre of where the impact took place,”
according to a European Space Agency press release.
