NASA's James Webb, Hubble capture DART impact after asteroid strike

For the first time, Webb and Hubble have simultaneously captured imagery from the same target in the cosmos

On Thursday, the James Webb and Hubble telescopes revealed the first images of the Dart Mission, in which a spacecraft deliberately crashed into an asteroid. The incident also marked the first time the two most powerful space telescopes observed the same celestial object.

Hubble captured 45 images in the time immediately before and following DART's impact with Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos.

"This is an unprecedented view of an unprecedented event," summarized Andy Rivkin, DART investigation team lead of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.