![]() ![]() Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman – – Will we see DART’s impact from Earth? DART scientists install the spacecraft’s Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), June 2021. The second purpose is to stream images back during its final moments. So DART has to autonomously detect Dimorphos, fire its thrusters and use those DRACO images to ensure an effective collision. In fact, because Dimorphos is so close to Didymos, you can’t actually distinguish them until the last hour of the mission. This asteroid is 160m in diameter and we’re targeting it very fast – 22,500km/h. What will we see during the impact?ĭART is a really focused mission, but it has a camera named DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation).įirst is to see the asteroid. ![]() It’s going to be small, maybe about a 1% change, which may be about 10 minutes or so. We’re going to turn back to those telescopes after the impact and they’ll tell us how much we changed the orbit time. We know it takes 11 hours and 55 minutes for Dimorphos to go around Didymos right now. These have already been studying this double asteroid system for decades. Instead, we’ll use telescopes here on Earth. We want to know how much we deflected the asteroid, but the spacecraft will be totally destroyed. The fact that it’s a double asteroid is key to enabling the mission. It’s just going to change how it goes around the much larger asteroid ever so slightly. The largest one is named Didymos and has a moon that orbits around it, Dimorphos.ĭART is targeting that small moon. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL – –ĭART’s target is actually a double asteroid. The event will be witnessed by the LICIACube satellite. Which asteroid will DART impact? The intention of the DART impact is to alter the orbit that the moon Dimorphos takes around asteroid Didymos. It’s important to say that the Dimorphus asteroid is not a threat to Earth: this is just a test. When you do this years in advance, it adds up over time so that the asteroid and Earth aren’t on a collision course in the future. Rather, we give it a small nudge, which changes its orbit ever so slightly. If one was ever discovered to be on course with Earth, this method could potentially deflect it. Key to that strategy is finding asteroids ahead of time. DART is just one part of a much larger planetary defence strategy. ![]()
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