Astronomers and spacecraft engineers from NASA and European Space Agency are working on an ambitious plan to prevent a killer asteroid from crashing into the Earth.
- AIDA Mission: The mission is known as the Asteroid Impact Deflection Assessment (AIDA) which aims to deflect part of a double asteroid known as Didymos by crashing a spacecraft into it.
- Target Didymos Asteroid: Didymos’s main body measures about 780 m across, and is orbited by a “moonlet” about 160 metres in diameter – roughly the size of Egypt’s Great Pyramid.
- Aim: The aim of this mission is to hit the smaller of these two space rocks as the asteroid system passes between Earth and Mars, throwing it off course.
- NASA’s DART: Under the mission Nasa will launch Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) in 2021 designed to smash headlong into its target.
- LICIACube: Flying along with DART will be an Italian-made miniature CubeSat called LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids) to record the moment of impact.
- HERA Mission: Then under this mission, ESA’s Hera mission which will perform a close-up survey of the post-impact asteroid, acquiring measurements such as the asteroid’s mass and detailed crater shape. Hera will also deploy a pair of CubeSats for close-up asteroid surveys and the very first radar probe of an asteroid.
- Conference in Aula Ottagona: The three-day International AIDA Workshop is going to take place on 11-13 September 2019 in the surroundings of the ‘Aula Ottagona’ in central Rome, part of the Baths of Emperor Diocletian which went on to serve as a planetarium in the last century. Participants will share the current progress of the two spacecraft making up AIDA – plus the smaller nano-spacecraft they will carry aboard them – as well the latest results of global astronomical campaigns undertaken to learn more about the distant Didymos asteroids.
