NASA DART impacted the asteroid Dimorphos, planetary defense now has new data to study

There planetary defensealthough it may bring to mind superhero operations, comics and TV series a very serious matter and concerns the possibility that a celestial object (asteroid, comet) may impact against the Land leading to serious consequences until the extinction of mankind. Unlike what is seen in the films, it takes several years of preparation with many field tests (and studies) and for this reason the NASA DART missionacronym for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, represents a turning point for humanity. How remembered from Thomas Zurbuchen (associate administrator of NASA) for the next 100 years there are no known asteroids dangerous for the Earth but the study of techniques to deflect them must be studied in time and in fact this mission was “alone” a test.

The mission was launched in the second half of November 2021 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Shortly before mid-September 2022 there was the separation from the main probe of the Cubesat Italian LICIACube wanted by ASI and made by Argotec who collected the images from a privileged point of view to better study the impact and destruction of DART against Dimorphosthe smallest asteroid of the double target system. Together with the small Italian satellite to observe the impact there were several telescopes from Earth as well as Hubble, JWST and even the Lucy probe.

NASA DART and the collision with the asteroid Dimorphos

The US space agency has chosen the binary system Didymos-Dimorphos because it does not represent a real danger to our planet even after the probe has hit the smallest (160 meters in diameter) between the two asteroids. After all NASA DART it has a relatively small mass even compared to that of the smaller of the two celestial objects but, thanks to the speed with which the impact occurred, it was possible to modify its orbital period which previously was equal to 11 hours and 5 minutes and to study its effects (deviating its path “natural”).

We remember that DART it had dimensions of 1.2 x 1.3 x 1.3 meters for the main body with two solar panels extending 8.5 meters each in opposite directions. There mass at the start it was equal to 610 kg while at the moment of impact it was about 570 kg having used propellant for corrective maneuvers (xenon and hydrazine). The impact occurred at a speed of approximately 6.1 km / s (21,960 km / h) and this force played a fundamental role.

In the last kilometers the probe used an autonomous driving system thanks to the telescope DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation) which allowed to frame the asteroid before bringing NASA DART to destruction. The telescope’s aperture was 208mm with a viewing angle of 0.29 and it used a CMOS sensor to capture the images.

The double asteroid system seen by the probe

The last image captured by the space probe before impact

All ‘“I listen” of the last moments of the spacecraft were the antennas of the Deep Space Network and in particular the Australian ones DDS43 and DDS35. L’impact between DART And Dimorphos occurred, as scheduled at 1:14 today (in Italy). At around 0:15 am, the control teams confirmed that theasteroid had been correctly framed while proceeding to the last approach considering that at 0:45 the probe was 11,200 km in approach. The downlink towards Earth occurred at a rate of 1 fps with 38 “needed to get from the probe to our planet (the distance to cover was around 11 million km). loss of signal (loss of signal) occurred as expected around 1:15 in Italy confirming the impact. This is just the beginning because now it is necessary to analyze the data and understand how the asteroid reacted to the impact and understand the next missions how they can be optimized in this sense.

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