After 10 months of flying through space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully impacted its asteroid target on Monday, September 26, 2022. It was NASA’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space and the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration. Mission contr
NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the smaller body of the Didymos binary asteroid system on September 26, 2022. This artist’s animation illustrates the impact. ESA’s Hera mission will survey ‘Didymoon’ post-impact and assess how its orbit has been changed by the collision, to turn this one-off experiment into a workable planetary defense technique. Credit: ESA–ScienceOffice.org’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test successfully impacted its asteroid target on Monday, September 26, 2022.
Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as seen by the DART spacecraft 11 seconds before impact. DART’s onboard DRACO imager captured this image from a distance of 42 miles . This image was the last to contain all of Dimorphos in the field of view. Dimorphos is roughly 525 feet in length. Dimorphos’ north is toward the top of the image. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
Now the investigation team will observe Dimorphos using ground-based telescopes to verify that DART’s impact altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos. Scientists expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%, or roughly 10 minutes. One of the primary purposes of the full-scale test is to precisely measure how much the asteroid was deflected.
The spacecraft only has a single instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation . However, together with a sophisticated guidance, navigation, and control system that works in tandem with Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation algorithms, DART was able to identify and distinguish between the two asteroids, targeting the smaller body.
DART’s CubeSat companion Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids , deployed from the spacecraft fifteen days before impact. Provided by the Italian Space Agency, LICIACube’s mission was to capture images of DART’s impact and of the asteroid’s resulting cloud of ejected matter.
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