DART Mission

DART Mission

Subject : Science & tech

Context : NASA is about to launch a spacecraft with one simple mission: Smash into an asteroid at 15,000 mph.

Concept :

• The mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, leaves Earth early to test whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can nudge it into a different trajectory. Results from the test, if successful,
• will come in handy if NASA and other space agencies ever need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and avert a catastrophic impact.
• The target of the spacecraft is a small moonlet called Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”).Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos (Greek for “twin”), every 11 hours and 55 minutes.
• Astronomers call those two asteroids a binary system, where one is a mini-moon to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years.
• This asteroid poses no threat to earth. It is essentially a target practice. DART’s impact will happen in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, roughly 6.8 million miles away.

About the Mission:

• DART is a low-cost spacecraft.
• It has two solar arrays and uses hydrazine propellant for maneuvering the spacecraft.
• It also carries about 10 kg of xenon which will be used to demonstrate the agency’s new thrusters called NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster–Commercial (NEXT-C) in space.
• NEXT-C gridded ion thruster system provides a combination of performance and spacecraft integration capabilities that make it uniquely suited for deep space robotic missions.
• The spacecraft carries a high-resolution imager called Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO).
• Images from DRACO will be sent to Earth in real-time and will help study the impact site and surface of Dimorphos (the target asteroid).
• DART will also carry a small satellite or CubeSat named LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids).
• LICIACube is expected to capture images of the impact and the impact crater formed as a result of the collision.

Reason for Choosing Dimorphos:

Didymos is a perfect system for the test mission because it is an eclipsing binary which means it has a moonlet that regularly orbits the asteroid and which can be seen when it passes in front of the main asteroid.

Earth-based telescopes can study this variation in brightness to understand how long it takes Dimorphos to orbit Didymos.