NASA’s DART spacecraft was 6.8 million miles from Earth when it slammed right into a soccer stadium-sized asteroid on Monday. Despite this immense distance, photographs from the affect and its aftermath are coming in, and so they’re proving to be higher—and way more weird—than we anticipated.

Going into Monday’s take a look at, it wasn’t clear how a lot of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test we’d get to see. At the very least, we have been hoping to get the POV expertise from DART’s onboard digital camera, referred to as DRACO, and views from the shoebox-sized LICIACube, which trailed intently behind NASA’s doomed spacecraft. They didn’t disappoint.

We additionally knew that telescopic eyes can be watching from a distance, together with ground-based observatories and two pretty well-known space-based telescopes, Hubble and Webb. Again, they didn’t disappoint.

It’s nonetheless early when it comes to the info gathering, however the mixed result’s that we’re getting a fairly clear image of what occurred when DART slammed into Dimorphos. This is unbelievable when it comes to participating the general public in what’s a crucial mission to deflect an asteroid, but in addition when it comes to the science wanted to determine if it truly labored.