Thread by @elakdawalla

Here's the replay of the DRACO camera view of the #DARTMission impact onto Dimorphos, the moon of Didymos earlier today. Now time for me to play with some images...

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1574539270987173903

Well I probably can't beat this #DARTMission

https://twitter.com/mayorgalc/status/1574561932895744000

Oooooohhhhh! Wow!

https://twitter.com/VirtualTelescop/status/1574551231267147776

Okay, here's my first quick-and-dirty animation of the #DARTmission DRACO images I screengrabbed from the broadcast, aligned on Dimorphos. I watermarked it because it is not a great product, but it is a product that exists. Better to come.

I'm going to go have some dinner, then I will science the images that have been shared so far!

So there are now four images released on the DART website, the final partial image and these 3. Let's do some science. dart.jhuapl.edu/Gallery/

Here's the last full image of both Didymos (right) and Dimorphos (left). I stretched the bejeezus out of the contrast and didn't find any detail in the dark areas. But there's lots of cool stuff to see on the daysides! (All images credit NASA/JHUAPL, edited by me) 1/n

Some folks have noted a smooth area around what looks like the equator of Didymos. I also see many depressions (probable craters) as well as signs of mass wasting (that is, landslides). All remind me of Saturn moons, like Helene.

Thanks, Roman! Here's a nicely processed version of the best full-globe image of Dimorphos. Dimorphos is not fully lit here, it's at a moderate phase, so there's a lot of surface within view that is dark because it's not facing the Sun.

https://twitter.com/_RomanTkachenko/status/1574595327050584065

My main impressions of Dimorphos are twofold: (1) lots and lots of blocks. Very sharp, very angular blocks. Something got shattered and then reassembled into this thing. Much like Itokawa and Ryugu, the asteroids visited by Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, only more blocky.

My other impression of Dimorphos is that, despite how blocky its surface is, it's quite round! It's an awfully small thing to be so egg shaped, quite a contrast to Itokawa and Ryugu.

Dimorphos' roundness reminds me of Methone, another of Saturn's odd little moons. It is SUPER egg shaped, likely made of dust barely held together inside its Roche limit. (Cassini photo credit NASA/JPL/SSI, processed by Phil Stooke)

My hypothesis is that Dimorphos' egg shape results from being a very loosely bound pile of rubble that has arrived at that shape through tidal forces that squished and squashed it until it despun into a spin-orbit resonance. But that's just a guess. Let's see what science shows!

That's all the armchair science I'm going to do tonight. Time to relax a bit before I'm on BBC World News.

Tomorrow, I'll have to move on to other things that pay the bills. But this has been a really fun day! #DARTMission

(P.S. Here's my Patreon if you want to support me doing more threads like this when space science happens!)

patreon.com/elakdawalla

https://twitter.com/TM_Eubanks/status/1574600561705603072