NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is set to make history on September 26 as the world’s first planetary defense test, and the spacecraft’s own “mini-photographer” LICIACube (short for Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids) is warming up to capture the event.
Key points
- DART is programmed to ram itself into a distant asteroid at 14,000 miles per hour (25,500 kilometres per hour) in deep space to demonstrate the agency’s future ability to defend Earth from hazardous space rocks.
- Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART is the first mission to test a method of deflecting an asteroid for planetary defence.
- DART’s target is the binary asteroid system Didymos, which means “twin” in Greek and its moonlet Dimorphos, according to astronomy news website Space.
- The mission mimics NASA’s protocol if an asteroid were headed toward Earth.
- Didymos poses no threat to earth but is being used as a test subject to assess DART’s accuracy
- DART will deliberately impact Dimorphos at speeds of 25,500 kph. A direct hit will cause the targeted asteroid’s orbital speed to change by a fraction of a per cent and this shift should be enough to change its orbital period by several minutes.
- As the spacecraft approaches its target, an onboard high resolution camera — DRACO will help navigate the DART spacecraft and take measurements of the target asteroid, including the size and shape of Dimorphos.
- LICIACube (Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging Asteroids) will follow DART with 2 optical cameras and observe the impact from a distance of about 1,000 km. It will help confirm whether the experiment has worked.
