The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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This animation is built with infrared images taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) 3 September 2006, and shows the scene of the SMART-1. It is possible to see the impact flash and the dust cloud that followed.
The scene is observed from the exposure just before the impact to about 130 seconds later, corresponding to about ~10 images overall. In order to look at the dust generated by the impact, the scene from before the impact has been substracted from all the images. Each image is a snapshot taken over 10 seconds, with a gap of about 5 seconds in between the different exposures.
No processing to enhance the signal and minimize the background noise has been made on these images. Courtesy of CFHT.