DART: Double Asteroid Redirection Test

An on-orbit demonstration of asteroid deflection is a key test that NASA and other
agencies wish to perform before any actual need is present. The DART mission is
NASA's demonstration of kinetic impactor technology, impacting an asteroid to adjust its
speed and path. DART will be the first-ever space mission to demonstrate asteroid
deflection by kinetic impactor. The spacecraft launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

LAUNCH:
November 23, 2021, 10:21 p.m. PST
(November 24, 2021, 1:21 a.m. EST)

DART IMPACT:
September 26, 2022, 7:14 p.m. EDT
Didymos—The Ideal Target for DART's Mission

Illustration of how DART's impact will alter the orbit of Dimorphos about Didymos. Telescopes on Earth will be
able to measure the change in the orbit of Dimorphos to evaluate the effectiveness of the DART impact.
DART's target is the binary asteroid system Didymos, which means "twin" in Greek (and
explains the word "double" in the mission's name). Didymos is the ideal candidate for
humankind's first planetary defense experiment, although it is not on a path to collide
with Earth and therefore poses no actual threat to the planet. The system is composed
of two asteroids: the larger asteroid Didymos (diameter: 780 meters, 0.48 miles), and
the smaller moonlet asteroid, Dimorphos (diameter: 160 meters, 525 feet), which orbits
the larger asteroid. Currently, the orbital period of Dimorphos around Didymos is 11
hours and 55 minutes, and the separation between the centers of the two asteroids is
1.18 kilometers (0.73 miles). The DART spacecraft will impact Dimorphos nearly head-
on, shortening the time it takes the small asteroid moonlet to orbit Didymos by several
minutes.

The Didymos system is an eclipsing binary as viewed from Earth, meaning that
Dimorphos passes in front of and behind Didymos as it orbits the larger asteroid as
seen from Earth. Consequently, Earth-based telescopes can measure the regular
variation in brightness of the combined Didymos system to determine the orbit of
Dimorphos. After the impact, this same technique will reveal the change in the orbit of
Dimoprhos by comparison to measurements prior to impact. The timing of the DART
impact in September 2022 was chosen to be when the distance between Earth and
Didymos is minimized, to enable the highest quality telescopic observations. Didymos
will still be roughly 11 million kilometers (7 million miles) from Earth at the time of the
DART impact, but telescopes across the world will be able to contribute to the global
international observing campaign to determine the effect of DART's impact.

The DART demonstration has been carefully designed. Didymos's orbit does not
intersect Earth's at any point in current predictions, and the impulse of energy that
DART delivers to Dimorphos is low and cannot disrupt the asteroid. The mass of the
DART spacecraft at the time of its kinetic impact with Dimorphos is expected to be
roughly 570 kilograms (1260 pounds), depending on the amount of fuel used by the
spacecraft prior to the kinetic impact event. The mass of Dimorphos has not been
directly measured, but using assumptions for the asteroid’s density and size, the mass
of Dimorphos is estimated as roughly 5 billion kilograms. Additional detailed information
about the Didymos binary asteroid system and DART’s planned kinetic impact geometry
can be found in this publication. Furthermore, the change in Dimorphos's orbit by
DART’s kinetic impact is designed to bring its orbit slightly closer to Didymos. The
DART mission is a demonstration of a capability to respond to a potential asteroid
impact threat, should one ever be discovered.

DART is a spacecraft designed to impact an asteroid as a test of technology. DART’s

target asteroid is NOT a threat to Earth. This asteroid system is a perfect testing ground
to see if intentionally crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is an effective way to
change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future.
While no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit
Earth for the next 100 years, only about 40 percent of those asteroids have been found
as of October 2021.

DART Partners & Collaborators

The Lowell Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, one of the telescopes across the globe that
will be used to evaluate the result of the DART impact. (Credit: Lowell Observatory)
The DART mission is being developed and led for NASA by the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory. NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination
Office is the lead for planetary defense activities and is sponsoring the DART mission.
Current U.S. partner institutions on DART include NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,
NASA Johnson Space Center, NASA Langley Research Center, NASA Glenn Research
Center, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA Kennedy Space Center, NASA's
Launch Services Program, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SpaceX, Aerojet Rocketdyne,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Auburn University, Carnegie Science Las
Campanas Observatory, University of Colorado, Las Cumbres Observatory, Lowell
Observatory, University of Maryland, New Mexico Tech with Magdalena Ridge
Observatory, Northern Arizona University, Planetary Science Institute, and the U.S.
Naval Academy. The DART Investigation Team also includes members from institutions
across the country and around the world, and a full list is available at the Team Page.
LICIACube, DART's companion cubesat, is contributed by Agenzia Spaziale Italiana
(ASI) and built by Argotec. LICIACube was deployed from the DART spacecraft fifteen
days prior to DART's impact to capture images of the event and its effects. LICIACube
Italian partner institutions include: Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) - Osservatorio
Astronomico di Roma; INAF - Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Roma; INAF
- Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste; INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova;
INAF - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Firenze; INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di
Capodimonte, Napoli; CNR - Istituto di Fisica Applicata “Nello Carrara” (IFAC);
Politecnico di Milano; Università di Bologna; Università Parthenope, Napoli.

Hera and the AIDA International Collaboration

Illustration of ESA's Hera spacecraft and its two companion cubesats investigating Dimorphos and the crater
produced by DART's impact. (Credit: ESA)
The Hera mission, a program in the European Space Agency's (ESA) space safety and
security activities, is planned to launch in 2024 and rendezvous with the Didymos
system in 2026, roughly four years after DART's impact. During Hera's mission, the
main spacecraft and its two companion cubesats will conduct detailed surveys of both
asteroids, with particular focuses on the crater left by DART's collision and a precise
determination of the mass of Dimorphos. Hera's detailed post-impact investigations will
substantially enhance the planetary defense knowledge gained from DART's asteroid
deflection test.
The two missions, DART and Hera, are being designed and operated independently,
but their combination will boost the overall knowledge return to a significant degree.
NASA's DART mission is fully committed to international cooperation, and ESA's Hera
team members are welcomed as full members of the DART team, to contribute to
DART's planetary defense investigations and to fully inform Hera's mission.

Both DART and Hera team members are part of the largely international collaboration
known as AIDA—Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment. AIDA is the international
collaboration among planetary defense and asteroid science researchers that will
combine the data obtained from NASA's DART mission, which includes ASI's
LICIACube, and ESA's Hera mission to produce the most accurate knowledge possible
from the first demonstration of an asteroid deflection technology. AIDA is the combined
effort of the DART, LICIACube, and Hera teams, along with other researchers
worldwide, to extract the best possible information for planetary defense and Solar
System science from these groundbreaking space missions. The AIDA collaboration
exemplifies the acknowledgment that planetary defense is an international effort and
that scientists and engineers around the world seek to solve problems related to
planetary defense through international collaborations.

© 2022 The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory LLC.

https://dart.jhuapl.edu/Mission/index.php
 A dry run to save the planet: NASA DART probe closing in on asteroid
impact

by GEORGIA MICHELMAN
SEP 08, 2022

How it started, how it's going: SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying NASA’s first planetary defense test mission
launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Nov 23, 2021 / Photo via US Space Force

s NASA nears the climax of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the
head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office wants you to know that
their strategy for dealing with an Earth-bound asteroid is nothing like “the
ways depicted in all the Hollywood movies.”

Lindley Johnson, who oversees the Planetary Defense Coordination Office

(PDCO), says NASA has no plans to violently detonate any near-Earth
asteroids, as depicted in Bruce Willis’s mission in Armageddon. Instead,
NASA’s latest step to prepare for such a catastrophe is more akin to a
carefully-engineered pool shot in the form of the Double Asteroid Redirection
Test (DART).

If the DART spacecraft is the cue ball, the target billiard ball in question is a
double asteroid system called Didymos.

Called the “kinetic impaction” technique, this method of deflection involves

smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid, and the DART mission will be the first
real-life test of its viability. The spacecraft, launched on November 24, 2021,
will finally collide with Didymos on September 26 at 7:14 pm Eastern Daylight
Time.

Didymos is merely a test candidate, not a genuine hazard; at its closest, the
system will still be some 11 million km from Earth. The planned deflection will
not affect the path of an asteroid towards Earth, but rather disrupt the orbit of
Didymos’ moon about its central body. If all goes well, the moonlet,
Dimorphos, will be nudged such that its orbit around Didymos is shortened by
several minutes. If this prediction is correct, NASA will prove not only that
they can change an asteroid’s orbit, but also that they can control its outcome.

The Planetary Defense Coordination Office

NASA has been tracking asteroids since 1998, when scientists at Cambridge’s

Minor Planet Center discovered an asteroid they believed to be on an Earth-
bound path. While the asteroid proved not to be a real threat, it served as a
wake-up call to astronomers, who soon established a near-Earth object
surveillance program.

The PDCO, established in 2016, takes the threat of an asteroid-driven

apocalypse even more seriously than its predecessor. The PDCO’s mission is
four-fold: find, warn, coordinate, and mitigate.

The “find” facet of the strategy may sound less glamorous than “mitigate,” but
sufficiently early awareness of hazardous asteroids is key. In an interview with
OnlySky, Lindley Johnson emphasized the important role that NASA’s NEO
Surveyor will play in planetary defense strategy:
With a space-based capability, we could find the population of asteroids down to 140
meters or so in size within just 10 years, and have a good understanding of what the
threat could really be out there decades in advance. That provides us sufficient time
then to develop what we would need to do to deflect an object off of the hazardous
trajectory.
Lindley Johnson, Planetary Defense Officer, NASA

Given that only about 40% of potentially hazardous asteroids over 140 m have
been discovered as of yet, the PDCO’s discovery efforts serve as the foundation
for their entire planetary defense strategy. 

Johnson also spoke highly of the coordination between the PDCO and other
countries’ space programs, particularly through the International Asteroid
Warning Network. The hunt for hazardous objects, he said, “is actually a very
nice area for nations to participate, collaborate together… Over 30 countries
are participating in trying to find these objects and will be able to help in
characterizing their sizes and what the threat really is.”

DART’s origins

While DART was not officially a NASA project until 2017, the idea of kinetic
impaction via spacecraft is decades old. 

cientists have used computer simulations to test this concept extensively. For
example, MIT researchers simulate kinetic impaction using possible impact
trajectories of actual asteroids. Though these asteroids are not a real threat,
astronomers can learn much about the timing necessary for accurate asteroid
deflection through experimenting with “scenarios in which the asteroids may
be headed toward a gravitational keyhole”—i.e approaching certain points
along Earth’s gravitation field such that gravity would send them hurtling
directly at us.

With a space-based capability, we could find the

population of asteroids down to 140 meters or so in
size within just 10 years, and have a good
understanding of the threat decades in advance.
PLANETARY DEFENSE OFFICER LINDLEY JOHNSON

Despite the importance of these kinds of simulations—which allow scientists

to vary factors such as asteroid mass, size, and speed—theoretical
experimentation can only be so useful when the real-life technology still lags
behind.

Bringing this mission to life was first conceived by the European Space Agency
in the mid-2000s through the Don Quijote mission—named for the 17th-
century fictional hero who charges at high speed into a windmill. Don
Quijote’s mission was to send a double spacecraft system—the kinetic
impactor and an observer spacecraft—to collide with an asteroid, then observe
its changed orbital path. 

But by 2011, the project had been deemed too costly. Instead, the idea of
DART was developed under the new Asteroid Impact and Deflection
Assessment (AIDA) collaboration between the ESA and NASA, which
promised a more efficient approach.

By instead crashing into a moonlet asteroid orbiting a larger asteroid,

scientists hoped to observe the orbital effects of kinetic impaction much more
quickly than Don Quijote would have allowed.

Given Didymos’ proximity and its relatively well-characterized qualities, it was

the perfect fit for such a project. Its moonlet, Dimorphos, has a diameter of
about 160 m—just above the minimum size for an asteroid to be considered
“potentially hazardous”—while Didymos is around 780 m. Since Dimorphos
loops around Didymos every 12 hours, any change to this orbital period can be
observed far more rapidly than if a singular asteroid’s lengthy orbit around the
Sun were affected.
NASA

Global collaboration will be vital to measuring Dimorphos’ trajectory after its

impact this month. While the Europeans’ facet of the AIDA collaboration,
called the Asteroid Impact Mission, was later canceled, the ESA will now
contribute via the Hera probe. Hera will approach Didymos four years after
the impact, providing a more accurate glimpse of Dimorphos’ surface, mass,
and resulting orbit. DART itself will be accompanied by the Italian LICIACube,
a small imaging satellite that will capture the impact. 

If all goes well, the moonlet, Dimorphos, will be

nudged such that its orbit around Didymos is
shortened by several minutes. If this prediction is
correct, NASA will prove not only that they can
change an asteroid’s orbit, but also that they can
control its outcome.
Judging DART’s success

According to a 2021 paper, in order for DART to be considered a success, it

must achieve the following five criteria: 

1. Impact Dimorphos
2. Cause at least a 73-second change in its orbital period
3. Measure this orbital change with sufficient accuracy (within one
standard deviation)
4. Measure Dimorphos’s “momentum transfer,” a useful measurement that
takes into account post-impact momentum (and therefore velocity)
5. Use observational data to determine dynamical changes to Dimorphos

While the first item on the list is what we’ve been counting down the days to,
the science doesn’t stop there. After DART’s impact, a number of Earth-based
telescopes—including Arizona’s Lowell Discovery Telescope and
Chile’s Magellan Telescope—will track Dimorphos’ new orbit. 

To do so, astronomers will use a method similar to the planetary transit

method used to find exoplanets. As Dimorphos zips around Didymos, the
brightness of the system dims as one asteroid momentarily eclipses the other.
Thus, scientists can track varying brightness levels to determine each time that
Dimorphos loops back around. As telescopes observe the system for a number
of orbits, researchers will be able to calculate Dimorphos’ new, presumably
shorter, orbital period.

Calculating Dimorphos’ momentum transfer value will also be helpful in

understanding its post-impact behavior. The momentum transfer is
dependent on factors such as the material of the asteroid, the amount of
material ejected as a result of the impact, and the spacecraft’s incoming speed.
This measurement, in conjunction with criterion #5, will provide even more
information about the collision’s effects on the moonlet.

Deflect, deflect, deflect

DART’s impact on the 26th, as the first real-life test of asteroid deflection, will
lead the way in future applications of deflection techniques.
While the search for potentially hazardous asteroids is first and foremost –
Johnson estimates with the help of the NEO Surveyor we’ll have a complete
catalog of near-Earth objects by the late 2030s—studies of other possible
deflection techniques are also already underway.

In comparison with DART’s kinetic impaction technique, the “gravity tractor”

method will function more slowly and more carefully. This technology is
dependent on “the mutual gravitational interaction between [a] spacecraft and
the asteroid,” said Johnson, “maintaining a precise position from the asteroid
and using nature’s tug rope… to just slowly tug that asteroid off the offending
trajectory.”

Another spin on this technique is the “enhanced gravity tractor,” which would
steal a multi-ton boulder from the asteroid itself in order to increase the mass
of the spacecraft, therefore imparting an even greater tug.

And while Johnson asserted that the Armageddon method was not so accurate
—particularly the idea that an asteroid would be discovered mere weeks before
impact—using a nuclear device may still be a possibility. However, simply
detonating an asteroid would not necessarily mitigate the threat of collision,
as its ejected debris could still pose a problem. 

Instead, a nuclear device would be detonated some distance from the surface
of the asteroid, so that it “superheats the asteroid, and causes things to
vaporize and blow off of the surface… that imparts a force on the asteroid and
again changes its velocity in its orbit and then changes its orbit.”

Looking forward

Regardless of DART’s outcome, astronomers worldwide will continue on the

case to find, model, and engineer away any Earth-bound threat.

Really, compared to the slew of ground-based threats we face every day,

asteroids are relatively easy. Johnson took the optimistic angle of this outlook:
“Folks should be aware that of all the natural disasters—earthquakes,
volcanoes, hurricanes—we don’t really know how to prevent those from
happening yet. But we know how to prevent this kind of natural disaster from
occurring… This can be undertaken at a relatively modest cost and humankind
does not have to worry about getting impacted by an asteroid in the future.”

Seems we don’t have to worry about this particular brand of Armageddon.

Nasa launches spacecraft in first ever mission to deflect
asteroid
Spacecraft heads off on 6.8m-mile journey to crash into moonlet Dimorphos in test to see if
asteroids can be diverted from collision with Earth
Reuters

Wed 24 Nov 2021 08.38 GMT

A spacecraft that must ultimately crash in order to succeed lifted off late on Tuesday
from California on a Nasa mission to demonstrate the world’s first planetary defence
system.
Carried aboard a SpaceX-owned Falcon 9 rocket, the Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection
Test) spacecraft soared into the sky at 10.21pm Pacific time from the Vandenberg US
Space Force Base, about 150 miles (240km) north-west of Los Angeles.

The plan is to crash the robot spacecraft into the moonlet Dimorphos at
15,000mph (24,100km/h) and change its path by a fraction. If the mission is
successful, it will mean that Nasa and other space agencies could deflect an
asteroid heading towards Earth and avert an Armageddon-style impact.

The Dart payload, about the size of a small car, was released from the booster minutes
after launch to begin its 10-month journey into deep space, some 6.8 million miles (11
km) from Earth.
Once there Dart will test its ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic
force. Cameras mounted on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft to be
released from Dart about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images
of it back to Earth.
The asteroid being targeted by Dart poses no actual threat and is tiny compared with the
cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth 66m years ago, leading to extinction of
the dinosaurs. But scientists say smaller asteroids are far more common and pose a
greater theoretical danger in the near term.
The team behind Dart chose the Didymos system because its relative proximity to Earth
and dual-asteroid configuration make it ideal for observing the results of the impact.

It is the latest of several Nasa missions in recent years to explore and interact with
asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system’s formation 4.6bn years ago.
Last month, Nasa launched a probe on a voyage to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting
near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft Osiris-Rex is on its way back to Earth
with a sample collected in October last year from the asteroid Bennu.
The Dimorphos moonlet is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a
permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by
Nasa.
Nasa has put the entire cost of the Dart project at $330m, well below that of many of the
space agency’s most ambitious science missions.
Dart mission: why is Nasa crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid?
The spacecraft will travel 6.8 million miles through the solar system in an
attempt to nudge moonlet Dimorphos a fraction off course

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or Dart,
spacecraft onboard Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
Warren Murray and agencies
Wed 24 Nov 2021 01.33 GMT

Nasa is preparing to launch its $330m Double Asteroid Redirection Test

(Dart) probe, testing the space agency’s ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory
with kinetic force.
The plan is to crash a robot spacecraft into the moonlet Dimorphos at 15,000
mph and change its path just a fraction. If the mission is successful, it will
mean that Nasa and other space agencies could deflect an asteroid heading
towards Earth and avert an Armageddon-style impact.
What is happening?
At 1.20am Eastern time the Dart spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from a launchpad in California. If liftoff is postponed
Nasa has an 84-day launch window in which to try again.

It will take 10 months to travel the 6.8m miles to Dimorphos and the collision
will not take place until September-October 2022.

Dimorphos is a football-field-sized asteroid that closely orbits a bigger asteroid, called

Didymos. Neither pose a threat to Earth. Nasa is simply undertaking some target
practice with the Didymos system because its relative proximity to Earth makes it ideal
to observe the results of the impact.

Before the crash, an Italian-made satellite called LICIACube will sensibly bail out from
Dart and position itself nearby to send pictures and data back to Earth.

Will it work?
LICIACube’s pictures and telescope observations from Earth should give some
indication of whether Dimorphos’s orbit has been altered. The goal is only to move it a
fraction of a percentage point.

Observations from ground-based telescopes and radar will then measure how much the
moonlet’s orbit around Didymos changes.

Why can’t they just blow it up?

Disappointingly – or perhaps reassuringly – Nasa will not anytime soon be lowering
Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to the surface of asteroid to (spoilers ahead if you’re joining
us from 1997) drill a hole, drop in a nuclear bomb and then try to get away quick
enough.

If an asteroid were to actually threaten Earth, it would be a good idea to identify it early
on and knock it off course, because the earlier that alteration to its trajectory can be
made, the further away from Earth it will hopefully end up.

The key to avoiding a killer asteroid is to detect it well in advance and be ready with the
means of changing its course, Nasa planetary defence officer Lindley Johnson told a
media briefing this month. “We don’t want to be in a situation where an asteroid is
headed toward Earth and then have to be testing this kind of capability,” he said.

There are lots of other ideas including running a spaceship alongside and using a laser,
ion engine jet or other kind of beam device to exert a slight but significant-over-time
effect. Or a robotic lander could mine and then eject material from the surface (mass-
driver effect), using Newton’s third law of action and reaction to change the course.
Solar sails could be hoisted nearby to reflect enough sunlight on to the object to have an
effect.

The Guardian: News website of the year

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/24/dart-mission-why-is-
nasa-crashing-a-spacecraft-into-an-asteroid

Nasa to slam spacecraft into asteroid in mission to avoid

future Armageddon
Test drive of planetary defence system aims to provide data on how
to deflect asteroids away from Earth

Linda Geddes
Mon 22 Nov 2021 16.04 GMT

That’s one large rock, one momentous shift in our relationship with space. On
Wednesday, Nasa will launch a mission to deliberately slam a spacecraft into
an asteroid to try to alter its orbit – the first time humanity has tried to
interfere in the gravitational dance of the solar system. The aim is to test drive
a planetary defence system that could prevent us from going the same way as
the dinosaurs, providing the first real data about what it would take to deflect
an Armageddon-inducing asteroid away from Earth.
Our planet is constantly being bombarded with small pieces of debris, but
these are usually burned or broken up long before they hit the ground. Once in
a while, however, something large enough to do significant damage hits the
ground. About 66m years ago, one such collision is thought to have ended the
reign of the dinosaurs, ejecting vast amounts of dust and debris into the upper
atmosphere, which obscured the sun and caused food chains to collapse.
Someday, something similar could call time on humanity’s reign – unless we
can find a way to deflect it.

Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission is the first attempt to
test if such asteroid deflection is a realistic strategy: investigating whether a
spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally
collide with it, as well as measuring the amount of deflection.

“This is the first step to actually trial a way of preventing near-Earth object
impact,” said Jay Tate, the director of the National Near Earth Objects
Information Centre in Knighton in Powys, Wales. “If it works, it would be a big
deal, because it would prove that we have the technical capability of protecting
ourselves.”
The 610kg Dart spacecraft is scheduled to blast off from the Vandenberg Space
Force Base in California onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at about 6.21am
UK time on Wednesday. Its target is the Didymos system – a harmless pair of
asteroids consisting of a 163-metre “moonlet” asteroid called Dimorphos that
orbits a larger 780-metre asteroid called Didymos – after the Greek for
“twin”).

As they orbit the sun, these asteroids occasionally pass relatively close to
Earth. The plan is to crash the spacecraft into Dimorphos when the asteroid
system is at its closest – about 6.8m miles away – some time between 26
September and 1 October 2022.

About 10 days before impact, a miniaturised satellite called the Light Italian
CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), will separate from the main
spacecraft, enabling images of the impact to be relayed back to Earth.
Combined with observations from ground-based telescopes, and an onboard
camera that will capture the final moments before collision, these recordings
should enable scientists to calculate the degree to which the impact has altered
Dimorphos’s orbit.

The expectation is that it will change the speed of the smaller asteroid by a
fraction of 1% and alter its orbital period around the larger asteroid by several
minutes.

Then, in November 2024, the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft will

visit the Didymos system and conduct a further close-up analysis of the
consequences of this celestial snooker game, capturing details such as the
precise mass, makeup and internal structure of Dimorphos, and the size and
shape of the crater left by Dart. Such details are vital for transforming asteroid
deflection into a scalable and repeatable technique, that could be deployed
should an apocalyptic asteroid ever be detected heading towards Earth.

Even then, it is unlikely that any single deflection strategy would be enough.
“Assuming it works, [this mission] will provide us with real time ground truths
on the effects of a small impactor on a small asteroid,” said Tate. “The problem
is that no two asteroids or comets are alike, and how you deflect one depends
on a huge number of variables: what’s the thing’s made of, how it’s put
together, how fast it’s spinning, and of course how much time you’ve got.

“There is no silver bullet in this game. What you need is a whole folder of
different deflection methods for different types of target.”

So while this may be one small step towards planetary protection, many more
are likely to be necessary to avoid Armageddon.

LOVE THIS A

NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slams into asteroid in historic

test of planetary defense
Data from the test will not only demonstrate whether the idea works, but
also help NASA understand how it could be applied in the future.

Sept. 27, 2022, 7:16 AM CST / Updated Sept. 27, 2022, 7:51 AM CST

By Denise Chow
It was a cosmic smash-up watched around the world.

A NASA spacecraft intentionally slammed into an asteroid Monday in a

historic test of humanity's ability to protect Earth from a potentially
catastrophic collision with a space rock.

The agency's DART probe, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, carried
out the first-of-its-kind maneuver on a small and harmless space rock known
as Dimorphos, which is about 6.8 million miles from Earth.

The $325 million mission was designed to see whether "nudging" an asteroid
can alter its trajectory, providing scientists with a valuable real-world test of
planetary defense technologies.

The DART spacecraft, which is about the size of a vending machine, crashed
into Dimorphos at 7:14 p.m. ET, flying head-on into the space rock at 14,000
mph.

A camera aboard DART captured live views of Dimorphos’ getting bigger as

the probe neared the asteroid. In the minutes before impact, the probe
beamed back jaw-dropping details of the space rock's craggy, uneven surface.

"Oh my goodness," said Elena Adams, a DART mission systems engineer at

the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Cheers erupted when the spacecraft's signal dropped, signifying that the probe
had, indeed, hit its target just after it sent its last images.
A DART view of the Dimorphos asteroid right before impact.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated the DART team, saying efforts
by the international group of scientists will help humanity protect Earth from
incoming asteroids.

"We are showing that planetary defense is a global endeavor and it is very
possible to save our planet," Nelson said.

It may take up to several weeks for NASA to confirm any changes in the space
rock’s trajectory. The goal is to shorten the asteroid’s nearly 12-hour orbit by
several minutes.

In a real-life planetary defense situation, even a small change in an asteroid's

trajectory — provided it is still far enough — could avert a doomsday impact.

Dimorphos, which measures 525 feet wide, orbits a much larger, 2,500-foot
asteroid named Didymos. Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos pose threats to
Earth, according to NASA.

The DART spacecraft launched into space in November and spent 10 months

journeying to its asteroid target.
The probe was not expected to survive the crash. A small, Italian-built satellite
that was deployed as part of the mission, was to fly within 25 to 50 miles of
Dimorphos a few minutes after the impact to snap photos.

In the days and weeks ahead, ground-based telescopes will be used to study
Dimorphos and time its orbit. A mission led by the European Space Agency,
scheduled to launch in 2024, will study the impact crater on the asteroid and
examine Dimorphos and Didymos in greater detail.

NASA hopes the DART crash will take up to 10 minutes off Dimorphos' orbit
around Didymos. Over time, that relatively small change is expected to grow.
If it is successful, it would demonstrate the effectiveness of carrying out such a
maneuver when a potentially hazardous asteroid is millions of miles away.

The DART mission is functioning as a proof of concept of asteroid deflection

as a planetary defense strategy. Data from the test will not only demonstrate
whether the idea works, but also help NASA understand how it could be
applied in the future.

NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is tasked with searching for

near-Earth objects that could pose threats to the planet. The agency said no
known asteroid larger than 450 feet across has a significant chance of hitting
Earth in the next 100 years, but scientists have warned that only a small
fraction of smaller near-Earth objects have been found.

Although the prospect of "killer asteroids" may sound far-fetched, the threat is
all too real, said Bruce Betts, the chief scientist at the Planetary Society, a
nonprofit organization that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to
promote space exploration.

The best-known example of a cataclysmic impact occurred around 66 million

years ago, when the Chicxulub asteroid, thought to have been 6 to 10 miles
wide, slammed into Earth and triggered a sudden mass extinction. The
incident annihilated the dinosaurs and killed almost three-quarters of all the
plant and animal species that were living on Earth at the time.

The largest asteroid impact in recorded history took place 114 years ago, when
a space rock exploded over a remote part of Siberia in 1908. The incident,
which came to be known as the "Tunguska explosion," flattened trees over
500,000 acres of uninhabited forest, according to NASA. Mysteries about the
Tunguska incident remain, but scientists have said the impact was most likely
caused by a space rock measuring 164 to 262 feet across.
Even much smaller space rocks can cause widespread damage.

In 2013, a tennis court-size space rock measuring about 65 feet wide streaked
across the sky and exploded in the atmosphere roughly 20 miles over
Chelyabinsk, Russia.

The explosion released energy equivalent to about 440,000 tons of

TNT, according to NASA. The blast and its shock wave blew out windows and
flattened trees over hundreds of square miles. More than 1,600 people were
injured.

"Chelyabinsk was a wake-up call," Betts said. "People started taking it much
more seriously after that, and the idea of planetary defense became much
more accepted publicly."

Betts said he hopes the DART mission will continue to raise awareness about
the importance of planetary defense.

"It's preparing for an unusual kind of disaster, because it has the potential for
catastrophic damage, but these things don't happen very often," he said. "But
if we plan for it and put in the effort now, it will pay off and we can actually
prevent a huge disaster in the future."

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/nasa-dart-asteroid-crash-
spacecraft-mission-rcna49413
What NASA’s Crash Into an Asteroid Looks Like
Astronomers on Earth — and a shoebox-size Italian spacecraft called LICIACube —
captured the DART mission’s successful strike on Dimorphos.

By Kenneth Chang
Sept. 27, 2022
NASA’s DART spacecraft was not able to take pictures of the very moment it slammed
into an asteroid on Monday at more than 14,000 miles per hour. Or the aftermath.

But telescopes on Earth, seven million miles away, were watching. The images they
recorded revealed a spectacular outburst of debris rising from the asteroid after the
collision.

The celestial show was a bonus to the spacecraft’s main objective of demonstrating a
method for defending the planet from deadly space rocks in the future.
“I saw the ground-based images in the minutes after impact, and they were absolutely
phenomenal,” said Cristina Thomas, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at
Northern Arizona University and the lead of the observations working group for the
mission.

Take, for example, the sequence depicted above that was captured with a 20-inch
telescope in South Africa. It shows the asteroid Didymos, about half a mile wide, moving
across the night sky. What cannot be seen is Dimorphos, the 500-foot-wide moon of
Didymos — and the target of DART.

“Our telescope in South Africa — we simply pointed in the direction of the asteroid,”
John Tonry, a professor of astronomy at the University of Hawaii, said. “And we started
taking images every 40 seconds.”

The sudden brightening comes from a cloud of debris tossed into space by the impact of
the spacecraft into Dimorphos.

“We didn’t really expect to see such a big plume of dust coming out,” Dr. Tonry said.
“But, you know, discovery favors the prepared.”
Dr. Tonry is co-principal investigator of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert
System, or ATLAS, which uses the South African telescope and three others around the
world to scan the sky for asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth.

Even though the telescope was nearly half a world away from him, Dr. Tonry saw the
pictures seconds after they were taken. “That’s the amazing thing about the internet,” he
said. “We looked at the picture and said, ‘Oh my God, look at that. Wow.’”
Dr. Tonry was surprised by how much debris was knocked off the asteroid and how fast
it was moving. “This stuff was screaming out at two kilometers a second, like 4,000
miles an hour,” he said. “And so within an hour, that cloud was as big as the Earth.”

Most of the debris was ejected from the point of impact, moving away from the side
where DART struck. “Which is exactly what you’d expect for a plume to be recoiling off
the surface,” Dr. Tonry said. But he said there also appeared to be a shell of debris rising
from the opposite side, moving in the same direction as DART.

“It may be that DART created a wave that went right through Dimorphos and kind of
blasted stuff off the far side,” Dr. Tonry said.

Right after the impact, the brightness jumped by a factor of 10 from sunlight bouncing
off the debris. It has dimmed since then, but the dot is still four times as bright
compared with what it was. A cloud of slower moving debris that remains in the vicinity
of Didymos and Dimorphos is likely to fall back to the surfaces of the two asteroids in
the coming weeks.

A similar sequence of images was taken by another telescope in South Africa by Amanda

Sickafoose, an astronomer who lives in South Africa but works for the Planetary Science
Institute based in Tucson, Ariz., and Nicolas Erasmus of the South African Astronomical
Observatory. (South Africa was a prime location for viewing the impact.)

“Seeing the ejecta was phenomenal,” Dr. Sickafoose said. “I feel like I
might never have the opportunity to see something like that again in
my life.”
On Monday, the Italian Space Agency released images that were taken by LICIACube, a
shoebox-size spacecraft that trailed DART to take before-and-after pictures of
Dimorphos.

In images after the impact, “the ejecta cloud is very complicated,” said Angela Stickle, a
planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the
lead for the group of scientists who performed computer simulations of the impact. “You
get sort of things that look a little bit like streamers. You get sort of asymmetric ejection.
And so it is definitely very complex.”

All of the plume data gives Dr. Stickle and her colleagues plenty to work with as they try
to understand the structure and composition of Dimorphos. The large plume and the
boulder-strewn surface that DART saw upon approaching the asteroid indicate a rubble
pile that Dr. Stickle said was loosely held together.

The other key measurement is the orbital period of Dimorphos around Didymos; it was
11 hours and 55 minutes before the smashup. But the head-on impact would have
sapped some of Dimorphos’s momentum, causing the moon to fall closer to Didymos.
The size of the change — expected to be about 1 percent — would give an indication of
how much material was kicked off the surface.

“Once we get the period change measurement from the telescope,” Dr. Stickle said,
“then we can start matching that to our simulation.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/science/nasa-dart-asteroid-photos.html
NASA’s DART spacecraft (right) will slam into the asteroid Dimorphos (left), with the Italian Space
Agency’s LICIACube (bottom right) bearing witness to the collision. The impact will alter Dimorphos's
orbit around the bigger asteroid Didymos (top right).
IMAGE BY NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS, APL/STEVE GRIBBEN

This NASA spacecraft will smash into

an asteroid—to practice saving Earth
The DART mission will try to alter a harmless asteroid’s orbit, a technology that
could one day defend Earth from armageddon.
BYMICHAEL GRESHKO

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 23, 2021

• 11 MIN READ

Like many of the solar system’s rocky objects, Earth bears the scars of
past asteroid impacts—including some wallops that shaped the arc of
life itself. Some 66 million years ago, for instance, a six-mile-wide
asteroid slammed into Earth near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula,
triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.

Now for the first time in our planet’s history, Earth is going to hit back.

At 10:21 p.m. Pacific Time on November 23, a NASA mission called

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) launched from Vandenberg
Space Force Base, California, to embark on a nearly year-long voyage
around the sun. If all goes well, DART’s journey will end on the evening
of September 26, 2022, when the golf cart-size spacecraft will
intentionally slam into a little, unsuspecting asteroid called Dimorphos.
Dimorphos is a harmless space potato, a 525-foot-wide “moonlet” that
orbits a bigger asteroid called Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes.
DART’s mission is to smash into Dimorphos at roughly 15,000 miles an
hour, altering the moonlet’s orbit around its parent body. The name
Dimorphos, Greek for “having two forms,” was chosen because the
asteroid will have one form before DART and one form after.

DART’s collision with Dimorphos will destroy the spacecraft, but it

should also cause the moonlet to settle into a tighter, shorter orbit
around Didymos, which astronomers will measure with Earth-based
telescopes. The $330-million mission is the first full test of technologies
that could be used to avert a future asteroid impact—a natural hazard
that, unlike earthquakes and volcanoes, humans can forecast many
years ahead of time.

“This is a mission for planet Earth—all the peoples of the Earth—

because we would all be threatened,” says NASA Administrator Bill
Nelson. “I’m pretty charged about DART. … If they connect me to where
I can watch this thing [collide], I guarantee you, I will be glued to a
screen.”

Didymos and Dimorphos pose no threat to Earth, and no known

asteroid is destined to collide with our planet for at least hundreds of
years. But experts often say that it’s a matter of when, not if, Earth finds
itself in the celestial shooting gallery.

“I tell people that planetary defense or near-Earth observations are not

the highest-priority thing that NASA needs to be doing—but the day will
come when it may be the most important thing that NASA does,” says
the space agency’s planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson.

Near-Earth objects
A DART-like deflector is only as effective as our surveys of the sky—the
key to buying time. “DART is probably the high-profile end of planetary
defense, but it’s only one part of planetary defense,” says DART
coordination lead Nancy Chabot, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

For decades NASA and other space agencies have been searching for
asteroids whose paths cross the orbit of Earth and predicting their
future movements. The goal is to understand the risks we face over
centuries so we’re not caught unawares.

“The Hollywood movies make it very dramatic and entertaining, but in

the real world, we don’t want to be in that situation,” Johnson says.

So far astronomers have found 890 near-Earth asteroids bigger than a

kilometer (0.6 miles) wide, more than 95 percent of the expected total—
and none of them will pose an impact risk for at least the next few
centuries. However, asteroids as small as 140 meters (460 feet) wide
could still devastate an area the size of some U.S. states, and many of
these objects have yet to be discovered. Computer models suggest that
there are roughly 25,000 near-Earth asteroids that are at least 140
meters wide, and as of late 2021, we’ve found only about 10,000 of
them.

Upcoming observatories, including a planned NASA space telescope

called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, should accelerate the pace of
discovery. If astronomers using these instruments find an asteroid
whose orbit intersects with Earth’s, humankind’s response will depend
on how much advance notice we have. 

If a large asteroid were discovered only a few months before impact,

one of our only options would be to detonate nuclear weapons next to
the object. X-rays from the blast would vaporize parts of the asteroid’s
surface, creating ejecta that would act like rocket thrust and nudge the
asteroid, hopefully enough to get it off a collision course.

But if an asteroid that’s not too big were found well ahead of its
forecasted impact, then the solution requires no nukes. A zippy
spacecraft like DART—called a “kinetic impactor”—could be sent to
collide with the asteroid and slightly tweak its orbit. Over many years,
that small deviation would add up to a major change in the asteroid’s
path, enough to render the object harmless.

Crash test
The researchers at APL who built the spacecraft have spent more than a
decade thinking through how binary asteroid systems like Didymos and
Dimorphos could provide a useful, safe place to test a kinetic impactor.
Adjusting an asteroid’s orbit around the sun could have unforeseen
consequences, such as unintentionally putting it on a far-future
collision course with Earth. Instead, DART will tweak the orbit of a
smaller asteroid around a bigger asteroid, with practically no effect on
the binary pair’s overall path.

The most daunting technical challenge DART faces: pinpointing

Dimorphos’s position as the spacecraft careens toward it at nearly
15,000 miles an hour. “We have no clue what Dimorphos actually looks
like,” says APL’s Elena Adams, the mission system engineer for DART.
“It could be a dog bone; it could be a doughnut.” 
To ensure that DART hits its mark, mission engineers developed a
guidance system called SMART Nav that will let the spacecraft
autonomously home in on Dimorphos using an onboard telescope.

For most of its journey, DART will have remarkably little to go on. The
spacecraft won’t be able to see the larger asteroid Didymos until four
hours before impact, and Dimorphos itself won’t pop into view until an
hour before showtime. By the time DART finishes its final trajectory
corrections—with two minutes and 500 miles until oblivion—
Dimorphos will be just 41 pixels across in DART’s field of view.

As it screams toward the target, DART will send back as many images of
Dimorphos as it can, possibly as many as one every 2.5 seconds before
impact. The terrain captured in these final images will be crucial to
understanding the blow that DART deals to its target because the
amount of ejecta thrown off the asteroid will depend on where the
spacecraft hits.

“There’s a lot of sensitivity to the details of where it lands: if it happens

to land on a boulder, or if it happens to land in finer materials,” says
Megan Bruck Syal, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory who studies asteroid deflection simulations. 

Exactly how much DART will nudge Dimorphos is unclear, but the
spacecraft’s creators are confident that it will pack plenty of punch. For
NASA to consider DART a success, the impact will need to shorten
Dimorphos’s orbit around Didymos by at least 73 seconds. DART’s team
predicts that the spacecraft could shave off as much as 10 minutes.

Following up
DART won’t be alone in its final moments. About 10 days before impact,
the spacecraft will eject a small CubeSat called LICIACube. Built and
operated by the Italian Space Agency, LICIACube will fly past
Dimorphos 165 seconds after DART makes contact.

Along the way, the little spacecraft will take pictures of Dimorphos’s
newly marred surface and the impact’s ballooning plume of debris.
LICIACube could even capture the flash of light from the impact. “We
are the real-time witness,” says Simone Pirrotta, the Italian Space
Agency’s project manager for LICIACube.

The CubeSat’s vantage point is crucial to DART’s mission: Scientists

need to have a precise accounting of how much momentum DART
transferred to Dimorphos, which means they must watch for the
growing shroud of ejecta that the collision will spray out. 

“It’s going to blast many tons of material off—maybe thousands of tons

—and we need to know how much material there is, how fast it’s going,
and where it’s headed,” APL’s Andy Cheng, a DART investigation team
lead, said in a November 4 press briefing.

For several weeks, LICIACube will transmit data back to Earth, and
then it will continue to drift through the solar system, its purpose
fulfilled. But it won’t be the last spacecraft to gaze upon the surface of
Dimorphos. The European Space Agency is working on a follow-up
mission called Hera, which will launch in 2024. Hera will perform a
more thorough survey of Dimorphos, poring over the moonlet’s surface
like a crime scene investigator.

Beyond advancing planetary defense, DART, LICIACube, and Hera will

fill a major scientific gap by visiting a binary asteroid system. Such a
visit has happened only once before: In 1993 NASA’s Galileo spacecraft
flew by the asteroid Ida on its way to Jupiter, where it discovered the
asteroid had a moonlet, now called Dactyl. “Science-wise, we have never
visited a binary asteroid on purpose,” says APL scientist and DART
investigation team lead Andy Rivkin.

Understanding how moonlets like Dimorphos form will give scientists

insight into the formation mechanisms at play in the early solar system,
when the planets themselves accreted from smaller bits of material.
Rivkin adds that since roughly 10 to 15 percent of all asteroids are
binaries, there is a reasonable chance that Earth’s next major asteroid
threat could be a binary—making study of these celestial pairs all the
more important. 
For Chabot, DART’s biggest promise lies in being the first of many
missions focused on averting a possible asteroid apocalypse. “It’s not
just an end in itself,” she says. “It’s opening up a whole new beginning.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/nasas-dart-spacecraft-will-smash-into-an-asteroid-
to-practice-saving-earth
Dimorphos: Nasa flies spacecraft into asteroid in direct hit
 By Jonathan Amos

 BBC Science Correspondent

27 September 2022
Updated 27 September 2022
The American space agency's Dart probe has smashed into an asteroid,
destroying itself in the process.
The collision was intentional and designed to test whether space rocks that might
threaten Earth could be nudged safely out of the way.
Dart's camera returned an image per second, right up to the moment of impact with the
target - a 160m-wide object called Dimorphos.
What had been a steady image stream cut out as the probe was obliterated.

 Impact crater may be dinosaur killer's baby cousin

 Dart asteroid-smashing mission launches
 Winchcombe meteorite gets official classification


 IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/JHU-APL
 Image caption,
 Dart's navigation system first had to distinguish the smaller rock (Dimorphos) from the
larger one (Didymos)

Controllers, based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-
APL), erupted with joy as Dimorphos filled the field of view on Dart's camera just before
then going blank. Initial calculations suggest the impact was a mere 17m off the exact
centre of Dimorphos.
It will be some weeks before scientists on the Nasa-led mission know for sure whether
their experiment has worked, but Dr Lori Glaze, the director of planetary science at the
space agency, was convinced something remarkable had been achieved.
"We're embarking on a new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the
capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous hazardous asteroid
impact. What an amazing thing; we've never had that capability before," she told
reporters.
And Dr Elena Adams, a JHU-APL mission systems engineer, said "earthlings should
sleep better" knowing they had a planetary defence solution.

 IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/JHU-APL
 Image caption,
 Dimorphos is probably a loosely consolidated collection of smaller rocks - a "rubble pile"
Researchers will determine success, or otherwise, by studying the changes to the orbit
of Dimorphos around another asteroid known as Didymos.
Telescopes on Earth will make precise measurements of the two-rock, or binary,
system.
Before the collision, Dimorphos took roughly 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its 780m-
wide partner.
This ought to reduce by a few minutes following the crash.
Certainly, on the evidence of the pictures coming back from 11 million km from Earth,
everything appeared to go exactly to plan.
The Dart probe, moving at the relative velocity of 22,000km/h, had to first distinguish the
smaller rock from the larger one. Onboard navigation software then adjusted the closing
trajectory with thruster firings to ensure a head-on collision.
Scientists were fascinated to see - albeit briefly - the different shapes of the two
asteroids.
IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/JHU-APL
Image caption,
The last whole frame to come down before the feed from Dart was abruptly lost

Didymos, as expected, had a diamond shape. There were boulders on its surface but
also some smooth areas.
Dr Carolyn Ernst, the instrument scientist on Dart's camera system, was extremely
excited to see Dimorphos.
"It looks adorable; it's this little moon; it's so cute," she said.
"It looks in a lot of ways like some of the other small asteroids we've seen, and they are
also covered in boulders. So we suspect it is likely to be a rubble pile, kind of loosely
consolidated."
Dart is an acronym for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
It was designed to do "exactly what is says on the tin", JHU-APL mission lead Dr Andy
Rivkin told BBC News.
"This technique, called the 'kinetic impactor technique' could be used if there were to be
an asteroid that was incoming at some point in the future. It's a very simple idea: you
ram the spacecraft into the object you're worried about, and you use the mass and the
speed of your spacecraft to slightly change the orbit of that object enough so that it
would miss the Earth instead of hitting the Earth."
IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/ASI
Image caption,
LiciaCube saw a plume of debris enveloping Dimorphos (top). Didymos is the foreground object

Dimorphos and Didymos were carefully chosen. Neither was on a path to intersect with
Earth before the demonstration, and a small alteration in their orbital relationship will not
have increased the risk.
But there are rocks out there that could potentially pose a danger to us.
Although sky surveys have identified more than 95% of the monster asteroids that could
initiate a global extinction were they to collide with Earth (they won't; their paths have
been computed and they won't come near our planet), this still leaves many so-far
undetected smaller objects that could create havoc, if only on the regional or city scale.
IMAGE SOURCE,NASA/JPL-APL
Image caption,
Artwork: The Dart mission team is ecstatic at how well the targeting worked out

An object of Dimorphos's scale would dig out a crater perhaps 1km across and a couple
of hundred metres deep. The damage in the vicinity of the impact would be intense.
Hence the desire to see if an asteroid can be nudged into going slightly slower or faster.
The change in velocity wouldn't have to be great, especially if done many years in
advance of the expected intersection with Earth.

"An analogy is if you're wearing a wristwatch and you damage it, and it starts running fast by a
little bit," explained Dart mission scientist Dr Nancy Chabot, also from JHU-APL. "You might not
notice the error in the first day or two, but after a few weeks you will begin to notice that the
watch is just not keeping correct time anymore. It's running fast; it's ahead of where it should
be."

Dart's image stream may have ended abruptly at impact, but there was a small Italian
cubesat following three minutes behind. It was snapping away at the safe distance of
50km.
The LiciaCube's data will be beamed back to Earth over the next few days.
But even in the first picture returns it was evident that the cubesat caught sight of the
plume of debris dug out by Dart.
Four years from now, the European Space Agency (Esa) will have three spacecraft -
collectively known as the Hera mission - at Didymos and Dimorphos to make follow-up
studies.
IMAGE SOURCE,HERA/ESA
Image caption,
Artwork: The European Space Agency is sending three spacecraft for follow-up investigations

BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63039191.amp
Nasa Dart asteroid spacecraft: Mission to smash into
Dimorphos space rock launches
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website

 Published

24 November 2021

IMAGE SOURCE,NASA / JHUAPL / STEVE GRIBBEN

Image caption,
An illustration shows the Dart spacecraft approaching the Dimorphos and Didymos
asteroids

A spacecraft has launched on a mission to test technology that could one day tip a
dangerous asteroid off course.
Nasa's Dart mission wants to see how difficult it would be to stop a sizeable space rock
from hitting Earth.
The spacecraft will crash into an object called Dimorphos to see how much its speed
and path can be altered.
If a chunk of cosmic debris measuring a few hundred metres across were to collide with
our planet, it could unleash continent-wide devastation.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dart spacecraft blasted off at 06:20 GMT on Wednesday
from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
t is the first attempt to deflect an asteroid for the purpose of learning how to protect
Earth, though this particular asteroid presents no threat.
 US detects huge meteor explosion
  What could end the world as we know it?
 Asteroid impact risks 'underplayed'

"Dart will only be changing the period of the orbit of Dimorphos by a tiny amount. And
really that's all that's needed in the event that an asteroid is discovered well ahead of
time," said Kelly Fast, from Nasa's planetary defense co-ordination office.
Commenting on the launch, she said: "We're not out of the woods yet, we've got to get
out to Dimorphos, but this is a huge step along the way."

Asteroids are the left-over building blocks of the Solar System. In the extremely rare
event that a space rock's path around the Sun crosses that of Earth so that the two
objects intersect at the same time, a collision may occur.
The $325m (£240m) Dart mission will target a pair of asteroids that closely orbit each
other - known as a binary. The larger of the two objects, called Didymos, measures
around 780m across, while its smaller companion - Dimorphos - is around 160m wide.
Objects of Dimorphos' size could explode with many times the energy of a typical
nuclear bomb, devastating populated areas and causing tens of thousands of
casualties. Asteroids with a diameter 300m and larger could cause continent-wide
destruction, while those bigger than 1km would produce worldwide effects.
After escaping Earth's gravity, Dart will follow its own orbit around the Sun. It will then
intercept the binary as it approaches within 6.7 million miles of Earth in September
2022.
Dart will smash into the "moonlet" Dimorphos at a speed of around 15,000mph (6.6
km/s). This should change the speed of the object by a fraction of a millimetre per
second - in turn altering its orbit around Didymos. It's a very small shift, but it could be
just enough to knock an object off a collision course with Earth.
"There are a lot more small asteroids than there are large ones and so the most likely
asteroid threat we ever have to face - if we ever have to face one - is probably going to
be from an asteroid around this size," said Tom Statler, the mission's program scientist
at Nasa.
In 2005, Congress directed Nasa to discover and track 90% of near-Earth asteroids
larger than 140m (460ft). No known asteroids in this category pose an immediate threat
to Earth, but only an estimated 40% of those objects have actually been found.
Dart is carrying a camera called Draco that will provide images of both asteroids and
help the spacecraft point itself in the correct direction to collide with Dimorphos.
About 10 days before Dart hits its target, the American spacecraft will deploy a small,
Italian-built satellite called LiciaCube. The smaller craft will send back images of the
impact, the plume of debris kicked up and the resulting crater.
The tiny change in Dimorphos' path around Didymos will be measured by telescopes on
Earth. Tom Statler commented: "What we really want to know is: did we really deflect
the asteroid and how efficiently did we do it?"
A binary is the perfect natural laboratory for such a test. The impact should change
Dimorphos' orbit around Didymos by roughly 1%, a change that can be detected by
ground telescopes in weeks or months.
 The shoebox-sized satellites that could change the world
Dart team members inspect the spacecraft's solar arrays back in August

However, if Dart were to slam into a lone asteroid, its orbital period around the Sun
would change by about 0.000006%, which would take many years to measure.
The binary is so small that, to even the most powerful telescopes, it appears as a single
point of light. However, Dimorphos blocks some of Didymos' reflected light as it passes
in front, while the opposite occurs when the smaller object moves behind its bigger
companion.
"We can measure the frequency of those dimmings," explained Dart's investigation lead
Andy Rivkin, adding: "That's how we know that Dimorphos goes around Didymos with a
period of 11 hours, 55 minutes."
After the impact, astronomers will take those measurements again. "They'll happen a
little bit more frequently - maybe it'll be two every 11 hours 45 minutes, maybe it'll be 11
hours, 20 minutes," said Dr Rivkin, who is based at Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Laurel, Maryland.
There's a degree of uncertainty over how Dimorphos will respond to the impact, in part
because its interior structure isn't known. If Dimorphos is relatively solid inside, rather
than full of spaces, it might produce lots of debris - which would give the object an extra
push.
Dart's method for dealing with a hazardous asteroid is known as the kinetic impactor
technique. However, there are other ideas, including moving the asteroid more slowly
over time and even detonating a nuclear bomb - an option familiar from Hollywood
movies such as Armageddon and Deep Impact.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59327293

09/07/2022 / Ashley Hume / DART Press Release

DART Sets Sights on Asteroid Target
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft recently got its first look at
Didymos, the double-asteroid system that includes its target, Dimorphos. On Sept. 26,
DART will intentionally crash into Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet of Didymos. While
the asteroid poses no threat to Earth, this is the world’s first test of the kinetic impact
technique, using a spacecraft to deflect an asteroid for planetary defense.

Credit:  JPL DART Navigation Team

This image of the light from asteroid Didymos and its orbiting moonlet Dimorphos is a
composite of 243 images taken by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera
for Optical navigation (DRACO) on July 27, 2022.

From this distance—about 20 million miles away from DART—the Didymos system is
still very faint, and navigation camera experts were uncertain whether DRACO would be
able to spot the asteroid yet. But once the 243 images DRACO took during this
observation sequence were combined, the team was able to enhance it to reveal
Didymos and pinpoint its location.

“This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques,” said
Elena Adams, the DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. “The quality of the image is similar to
what we could obtain from ground-based telescopes, but it is important to show that
DRACO is working properly and can see its target to make any adjustments needed
before we begin using the images to guide the spacecraft into the asteroid
autonomously.”

Although the team has already conducted a number of navigation simulations using
non-DRACO images of Didymos, DART will ultimately depend on its ability to see and
process images of Didymos and Dimorphos, once it too can be seen, to guide the
spacecraft toward the asteroid, especially in the final four hours before impact. At that
point, DART will need to self-navigate to impact successfully with Dimorphos without
any human intervention.

“Seeing the DRACO images of Didymos for the first time, we can iron out the best
settings for DRACO and fine-tune the software,” said Julie Bellerose, the DART
navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “In
September, we’ll refine where DART is aiming by getting a more precise determination
of Didymos’ location.”

Using observations taken every five hours, the DART team will execute three trajectory
correction maneuvers over the next three weeks, each of which will further reduce the
margin of error for the spacecraft’s required trajectory to impact. After the final
maneuver on Sept. 25, approximately 24 hours before impact, the navigation team will
know the position of the target Dimorphos within 2 kilometers. From there, DART will be
on its own to autonomously guide itself to its collision with the asteroid moonlet.

DRACO has subsequently observed Didymos during planned observations on Aug. 12,
Aug. 13 and Aug. 22.

Johns Hopkins APL manages the DART mission for NASA's Planetary Defense
Coordination Office as a project of the agency's Planetary Missions Program Office.
DART is the world's first planetary defense test mission, intentionally executing a kinetic
impact into Dimorphos to slightly change its motion in space. While the asteroid does
not pose any threat to Earth, the DART mission will demonstrate that a spacecraft can
autonomously navigate to a kinetic impact on a relatively small asteroid and prove this
is a viable technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth if one is ever
discovered. DART will reach its target on Sept. 26, 2022.

Sep 27, 2022

RELEASE 22-100
NASA’s DART Mission Hits Asteroid in First-
Ever Planetary Defense Test
After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the
world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its
asteroid target on Monday, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel,
Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT. 

As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid

Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an
Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered.

“At its core, DART represents an unprecedented success for planetary defense, but it is
also a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity,” said NASA Administrator Bill
Nelson. “As NASA studies the cosmos and our home planet, we’re also working to
protect that home, and this international collaboration turned science fiction into science
fact, demonstrating one way to protect Earth.”

DART targeted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small body just 530 feet (160 meters)
in diameter. It orbits a larger, 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos. Neither
asteroid poses a threat to Earth.

The mission’s one-way trip confirmed NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to
intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.

The investigation team will now observe Dimorphos using ground-based telescopes to
confirm that DART’s impact altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos. Researchers
expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%, or roughly 10 minutes;
precisely measuring how much the asteroid was deflected is one of the primary
purposes of the full-scale test.

“Planetary Defense is a globally unifying effort that affects everyone living on Earth,”
said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at
NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now we know we can aim a spacecraft with the
precision needed to impact even a small body in space. Just a small change in its
speed is all we need to make a significant difference in the path an asteroid travels.”
The spacecraft’s sole instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera
for Optical navigation (DRACO), together with a sophisticated guidance, navigation and
control system that works in tandem with Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real
Time Navigation (SMART Nav) algorithms, enabled DART to identify and distinguish
between the two asteroids, targeting the smaller body.

These systems guided the 1,260-pound (570-kilogram) box-shaped spacecraft through

the final 56,000 miles (90,000 kilometers) of space into Dimorphos, intentionally
crashing into it at roughly 14,000 miles (22,530 kilometers) per hour to slightly slow the
asteroid’s orbital speed. DRACO’s final images, obtained by the spacecraft seconds
before impact, revealed the surface of Dimorphos in close-up detail.

Fifteen days before impact, DART’s CubeSat companion Light Italian CubeSat for
Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), provided by the Italian Space Agency, deployed from
the spacecraft to capture images of DART’s impact and of the asteroid’s resulting cloud
of ejected matter. In tandem with the images returned by DRACO, LICIACube’s images
are intended to provide a view of the collision’s effects to help researchers better
characterize the effectiveness of kinetic impact in deflecting an asteroid. Because
LICIACube doesn’t carry a large antenna, images will be downlinked to Earth one by
one in the coming weeks.

“DART’s success provides a significant addition to the essential toolbox we must have
to protect Earth from a devastating impact by an asteroid,” said Lindley Johnson,
NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer. “This demonstrates we are no longer powerless to
prevent this type of natural disaster. Coupled with enhanced capabilities to accelerate
finding the remaining hazardous asteroid population by our next Planetary Defense
mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, a DART successor could provide what
we need to save the day.”

With the asteroid pair within 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) of Earth, a global
team is using dozens of telescopes stationed around the world and in space to observe
the asteroid system. Over the coming weeks, they will characterize the ejecta produced
and precisely measure Dimorphos’ orbital change to determine how effectively DART
deflected the asteroid. The results will help validate and improve scientific computer
models critical to predicting the effectiveness of this technique as a reliable method for
asteroid deflection.

“This first-of-its-kind mission required incredible preparation and precision, and the team
exceeded expectations on all counts,” said APL Director Ralph Semmel. “Beyond the
truly exciting success of the technology demonstration, capabilities based on DART
could one day be used to change the course of an asteroid to protect our planet and
preserve life on Earth as we know it.”

Roughly four years from now, the European Space Agency’s Hera project will conduct
detailed surveys of both Dimorphos and Didymos, with a particular focus on the crater
left by DART’s collision and a precise measurement of Dimorphos’ mass.

Johns Hopkins APL manages the DART mission for NASA's Planetary Defense
Coordination Office as a project of the agency's Planetary Missions Program Office.