Astronomers have continued to observe and study Dimorphos, well past the impact event. However, Dimorphos is the smaller asteroid in this binary system, and is just a small moon orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the only telescope capable of visually distinguishing between the two closely orbiting asteroids. Now, astronomers have made follow-on observations on the system with JWST to see what happened to Didymos after the dust cleared.

In a new preprint paper posted to the arXiv server, a team of scientists, led by Andrew Rivkin, the Investigation Lead for DART, explain how they used two instruments on JWST to measure spectra of Didymos about two months after the DART impact. One of their biggest takeaways is that Didymos and Dimorphos appear to be of the same composition, which is that of an ordinary chondrite. That's the class of stony meteorites which account for over 80% of total meteorite falls on Earth. This means DART's test was an extremely good proxy for the type of asteroids that might pose a threat one day.