In September, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to test a potential planetary defense technique. To celebrate the release of four new scientific papers confirming the method’s effectiveness, NASA has released a video of the collision captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA and other organizations are cataloging the solar system’s asteroids swirling around our neck so we get as many alerts as possible when someone is detected on a collision course with Earth. In that case, we could potentially launch a defensive attack to drive it away from our home planet, preventing a large-scale or even global catastrophe.

The Binary Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) was a practical launch of just such a strategy. To see if the asteroid’s orbit would change, NASA crashed a probe into a small space rock called Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid known as Didymos. Indeed, it soon became apparent that its orbit had shrunk much more than had been anticipated.

Now scientific papers have been published discussing the experiment, confirming the viability of the technique, and also giving more details on what happened. The surface of Dimorphos turned out to be much more filled with rocks and boulders than expected, and the impact actually lifted a large dust cloud that gave the asteroid some support.

“Before the collision, we expected this impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by only about 10 minutes,” said study co-author Tony Farnham. “But after the collision, we learned that the orbital period was shortened even more, reducing the normal 12-hour orbit to just over 30 minutes. In other words, the ejected material acted as a jet pushing the Moon further from its original orbit.”

The Hubble Space Telescope was also able to capture a time-lapse video of material ejected from the collision and how the cloud developed in the hours and days that followed. The video begins 1.3 hours before encountering a bright spot that contains both Didymos and Dimorphos. The second image shows the system with a visible cone of material two hours after the impact.

After about 17 hours, under the influence of the larger rock’s gravity, the cone begins to turn into a pinwheel shape. The debris is then swept back by the solar wind forming a comet-like tail. Afterwards, this tail is oddly bifurcated for several days.