NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft intentionally crashed into Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos, on Monday, 26 September 2022. This was the first planetary defense test in which an impact of a spacecraft attempted to modify the orbit of an asteroid.

Two days after DART's impact, astronomers Teddy Kareta (Lowell Observatory) and Matthew Knight (US Naval Academy) used the 4.1-meter Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope at NSF's NOIRLab's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to capture the vast plume of dust and debris blasted from the asteroid's surface. In this new image, the dust trail—the ejecta that has been pushed away by the sun's radiation pressure, not unlike the tail of a comet—can be seen stretching from the center to the right-hand edge of the field of view, which at SOAR is about 3.1 arcminutes using the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph. At Didymos's distance from Earth at the time of the observation, that would equate to at least 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) from the point of impact.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Mission is inching closer and closer. The overall mission architecture just hit a new milestone when Perseverance collected the first sample that will be sent back. But what happens once that sample actually gets here? NASA and its partner, ESA, are still working on that, but recently they released a fact sheet that covers what will happen during the first stage of that process—returning to the ground.

That return will take place in the middle of the desert in the western U.S., in an area called the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). While this may seem like an obscure place to land such an important mission, it does have several things going for it.