File:Stacked image of Dimorphos true orientation.jpg

English: Stacked image of Dimorphos from last images by the DART spacecraft. Copyright is not applicable for this image because NASA's images are in the public domain and the work is not original enough. Plus, it is trivial to just make a new stacked picture if this file is deleted.

The original DART/DRACO images shown in NASA's live stream were mirror-flipped from reality; this version corrects this issue. From DART's perspective, the Sun illumination direction comes from the right, shining down on Didymos and Dimorphos with an extra portion of their southern hemispheres exposed. (see Figure 2 of Rivkin et al. (2021) for a diagram of the Didymos system with the illumination, orbit, DART impact directions)

Ecliptic north points toward the top left corner of the image. Because the Didymos system rotates retrograde with respect to its heliocentric orbit, the rotational north pole of Didymos and Dimorphos points toward the bottom right corner of the image, opposite to the ecliptic north pole. When this image was taken, Dimorphos's orbital velocity was headed directly toward DART, which itself is moving directly toward Dimorphos for a head-on impact.