Page 1 - Spec Tech Vol 1 Issue 04

Dr. MGR-ACS Space Technology Centre

SPACE EXPLORER

“An Ingress to Borderless world”

Volume 01/Issue-05 Bimonthly 16-30,September 2022

NASA’s DART Mission Hits Asteroid in First-Ever

Planetary Defense Test

NASA has smashed a spacecraft into
an asteroid, and a small satellite
watched the whole thing happen.
The Double Asteroid Redirection
Test (DART) crashed into the
160-metre-wide moonlet Dimorphos on
26 September. Now, the Light Italian
CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids
(LICIACube) has sent back images of
the collision from up close.
DART’s goal in smashing into
Dimorphos, which orbits a larger
asteroid called Didymos, was to change
Plumes of debris erupting out of the asteroid Dimorphos ASI Italian Space
Agency its orbit in a test of how we might be
able to deflect an asteroid heading towards Earth. While the spacecraft documented its
approach to the asteroid, it was destroyed in the actual collision.

That is where LICIACube comes in. DART carried the 14-kilogram satellite in a spring-loaded box
and then ejected it on 11 September so it could fly past Dimorphos at a safe distance after the
collision. This was key to both figuring out how the collision affected the asteroid itself and
determining whether its orbit was changed.

The first images from LICIACube show huge plumes of debris erupting out of Dimorphos after the
collision. These pictures have not been analysed by scientists yet, but eventually they will reveal
information about the asteroid’s interior and how much of it was destroyed in the smash-up.

“Now the science can start,” said Katarina Miljkovic at Curtin University in Australia, in a
statement. “We needed a large-scale experiment… This is to ensure that, should Earth ever
encounter a dangerous asteroid hurling towards us, we would know what to do.”

It will take at least a few days to observe and calculate how Dimorphos’s orbit around Didymos
has changed. That will depend in large part on the asteroid’s internal strength and whether its
surface crumbled on collision or stood up to the crash. It’s like hitting something with a baseball
bat – if the object is a rock and doesn’t crumble, it will go further than a piece of fruit that breaks
up into many pieces. This information will help determine how future missions to protect Earth
from any potentially dangerous asteroids should be designed.

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