Key facts
- Category
- Asteroids
- Object class
- Rubble-pile asteroid
- Mass
- ~4 million metric tons
- Scale fact
- 177 mmaximum extent
- Estimated age
- ~4.5 billion years
- Host
- Didymos system
Dimorphos
177 mmaximum extent
Visual creditDART 2022 / Eydeet, using DART's satellite imagery by NASA / Public domainSource: Wikimedia Commons
Details
Dimorphos is the small moonlet of asteroid Didymos and the target struck by NASA’s DART spacecraft. DART shortened its orbit by roughly 33 minutes, making Dimorphos the first celestial body whose motion humans deliberately changed.
DART hit Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 at about 6.1 kilometers per second. The impact and escaping debris shortened the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos by 33 minutes and 15 seconds; later modeling also indicates that its shape changed. The experiment tested a kinetic impactor on a harmless binary asteroid whose orbital period could be timed from Earth.
Links
- Preset views
- Wikipedia
- Dimorphos on Wikipedia
- Universe journey
- Asteroid belt & Jupiter
Size neighbors
Objects near Dimorphos on the scale
On the logarithmic size axis, Dimorphos falls between Tunguska Meteoroid and 25143 Itokawa. The band uses nearby Asteroids records.
Shared physical scale
768m
Sources
References for Dimorphos
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- Dimorphos — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (DART 2022 / Eydeet, using DART's satellite imagery by NASA, Public domain)
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About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides explain selected parts of that range, while focused views filter the objects by subject.