Bullseye.🎯 Fifteen days before the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was scheduled to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos, the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) deployed, aiming to capture images of the impact and the asteroid’s resulting cloud of ejected matter. Swipe to see some of the first post-impact images sent back to Earth from LICIACube. LICIACube, DART’s CubeSat companion provided by the Italian Space Agency, is about the size of a briefcase and has two optical cameras: LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid). These photos will help researchers better understand the effectiveness of using a collision to knock an asteroid off its path, and europeanspaceagency's Hera project in 2026 will take a closer look at Didymos and Dimorphos, focusing on the collision crater and a precise measurement of Dimorphos’ mass. Image description: Each of these images is a different crop of DART’s impact with Dimorphos...