CBS I in the world behind the black 13 years behind the black's revelations and reporting

on man space, robotic space and planetary discoveries before us.

We go now to a fascination with Dymorphus, Bob, what is Dymorphus and what is Hubble's

scene?

Dymorphus is the asteroid that a space probe called Dott crashed into last year.

And the idea was that of Dott impacting that asteroid was to see how much, not only to see

how much the asteroid orbit could be changed by an impact, which is potentially a way to

protect us from an impact from a bigger asteroid later, but it also did asteroid research.

And we got to get a close look at another rubber pile asteroid.

In the impact, months after the impact, they turned the Hubble Space Telescope to look at the

asteroid itself and Hubble was able to pick out a cloud of large boulders ranging from 15 to 20 to

20 feet across boulders.

And I have the picture on behind the black of this cloud of boulders surrounding Dymorphus

after the impact.

It is that impact demonstrated several things about a rubber pile asteroid.

Yes, you might be able to move the orbit, but impacting a rubber pile asteroid is not a way to protect us from

Earth, at least you can't destroy the asteroid.

If anything, the impact makes it a big problem because you now have this cloud material, many of

which will hit the Earth.

And so you've actually widened the area of damage.

The goal was not, of course, to destroy the asteroid, but to see if they could move it.

They did move it, solar orbit somewhat, but we need to see it in orbit for a period of time before we can

...