Dimorphos

Dimorphos (formal designation (65803) Didymos I; provisional designation S/2003 (65803) 1) is a natural satellite or moon of the near-Earth asteroid 65803 Didymos, with which it forms a binary system. The moon was discovered on 20 November 2003 by Petr Pravec in collaboration with other astronomers worldwide. Dimorphos has a diameter of 177 meters (581 ft) across its longest extent. Dimorphos is the second smallest asteroid photographed and visited by a spacecraft, after Kamoʻoalewa. It was the target of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a NASA space mission that deliberately collided a spacecraft with the moon on 26 September 2022 to alter its orbit around Didymos. Before the impact by DART, Dimorphos had a shape of an oblate spheroid with a surface covered in boulders but virtually no craters. The moon is thought to have formed when Didymos shed its mass due to its rapid rotation, which formed an orbiting ring of debris that conglomerated into a low-density rubble pile that became Dimorphos today. The DART impact reduced Dimorphos's orbital period around Didymos by 33 minutes and ejected over 1 million kilograms (2.2×10^6 lb) of debris into space, producing a dust plume that temporarily brightened the Didymos system and developed a 10,000-kilometer (6,200 mi)-long dust tail that persisted for several months. The DART impact is predicted to have caused global resurfacing and deformation of Dimorphos's shape, leaving an impact crater several tens of meters in diameter. Post-impact observations of brightness fluctuations within the Didymos system suggest that the impact may have either significantly deformed Dimorphos into an ellipsoidal shape or may have sent it into a chaotically tumbling rotation. If Dimorphos was in a tumbling rotation state, the moon will be subjected to irregular tidal forces by Didymos before it will eventually return to a tidally locked state within...