NASA Successfully Crashes DART Spacecraft Into Asteroid Didymos

UPDATE 9/27: NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully collided with its Dimorphos target in the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space. The intentional crash was confirmed as successful(Opens in a new window) on Monday at 7:14 p.m. ET.

“Now we know we can aim a spacecraft with the precision needed to impact even a small body in space,” according to Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. “Just a small change in its speed is all we need to make a significant difference in the path an asteroid travels.”

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Using ground-based telescopes to observe Dimorphos, scientists hope to confirm whether DART’s impact altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos by the expected 1% (or roughly 10 minutes); measuring exactly how much the moonlet was deflected is one of the test’s primary purposes. The European Space Agency’s Hera project in about four years will conduct detailed surveys of Dimorphos and Didymos, focusing on the crater left by DART’s collision and precisely measuring the smaller asteroid’s mass.

DART’s CubeSat companion LICIACube, which separated from the spacecraft 15 days before impact, is expected to begin sending images of the impending impact and the resulting debris to Earth over the coming weeks.

Original Story 2/26: NASA is set to crash a space probe into an asteroid in an attempt to change its orbit.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will deliberately ram into minor-planet moon Dimorphos (of the double asteroid Didymos) to assess the potential of using a spacecraft’s impact momentum to deflect a wandering star that’s on a collision course with Earth.

NASA says DART’s target asteroid—the binary, near-Earth system Didymos, comprising 530-foot-diameter Dimorphos and 2,560-foot namesake Didymos—is not a threat to our planet. But it 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,” according to(Opens in a new window) the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

Launched in November 2021, the approximately 1,320-pound DART spacecraft will be 6.8 million miles from Earth when it reaches its target—at which point it’ll be traveling at about 4 miles per second and relying on an autonomous onboard navigator to stay on course.

Keeping watch from afar will be a DART “photographer” known as the LICIACube(Opens in a new window) (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids), which is programmed to document the effects of the impact, “capturing unique images of the asteroid surface as well as the debris ejected from the newly formed crater,” NASA says.

The Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube (pronounced LEE-cha-cube) deployed from the DART spacecraft on Sept. 11. Its on-board optical cameras—LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid)—will snap photos just two or three minutes after impact, capturing the ejecta plum and moonlet’s opposite hemisphere, which DART can’t see.

Following the strike, a team of investigators will(Opens in a new window) compare results of DART’s kinetic impact with Dimorphos to detailed computer simulations of kinetic impacts on asteroids, assessing how to use similar mitigation strategies in future planetary defense scenarios. Scientists expect the collision to shorten the smaller asteroid’s orbital period by several minutes—long enough for the effects to be observed and measured using telescopes on Earth.

The impact is currently scheduled for 7:14 p.m. ET. NASA’s coverage begins at 4:30 p.m. ET in the video above, while a live feed from the DART spacecraft will go live at 5:30 p.m. ET, viewable in the video below. A post-impact press briefing is scheduled for 8 p.m. ET.