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  • Presentation | P34B: Planetary Ring, Meteoroid, and Dust Populations and Effects II Oral
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  • P34B-05: Beyond the Initial Plume: Modeling the Long-Term Fate of DART Ejecta and Comparison with Extended HST Monitoring
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Author(s):
Linfeng Li, University of Michigan Ann Arbor (First Author, Presenting Author)
Yun Zhang, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
Sabina Raducan, University of Bern
Cheng Li, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
Martin Jutzi, University of Bern


In 2022, NASA's DART mission crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos. The impact created a long tail of dust and debris, whose shape and movement were influenced by the gravity of the two asteroids, as well as by the pressure from sunlight. We used computer simulations to understand the properties of this dust, especially the size and speed of the particles. By comparing our simulations to real images from the Hubble Space Telescope, we could determine the mix of particle sizes in the tail.


Our results show that sunlight pushed the smallest, lightest dust particles far away from the asteroid, while larger, pebble-sized particles (up to 4 inches across) remained much closer. In fact, our model shows these larger chunks were still orbiting the asteroid more than six months after the impact. This finding helps us understand how the dust tail evolves in space.




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