DART Asteroid Mission: NASA to Discuss Details of Test Launch Soon; What Will This Probe Do?

NASA will host a virtual media briefing today at 1 p.m. EDT. The announcement would be about the agency's first planetary defense test mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which they would expectedly launch this month.

Should an Earth-threatening asteroid be identified in the future, the mission will serve as a technological demonstration to see if purposely crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is a viable approach to redirect its trajectory. The asteroid that DART is tracking is not a threat to Earth.

The press conference will be broadcast live on NASA TV, the NASA app, NASA's website, and NASA's Twitter account (via Periscope). In a mission summary, the team behind DART said the mission is a demonstration of capabilities to respond to a future asteroid impact danger.

(Photo : NASA/Johns Hopkins APL via Wikimedia Commons)
Dart's ion thrusters

About DART Mission

DART is a large-scale NASA project that aims to divert an asteroid for planetary defense purposes through the "kinetic impactor" approach.

According to NASA, the DART mission will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. Space agency officials said per NASA Spaceflight that the spacecraft's original projected arrival time at its destination in late September 2022. They said the delayed launch window would not affect different factors.

The near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos and its small moon Dimorphos are DART's target. According to The Planetary Society, the DART project is the first planetary defense mission to test asteroid deflection strategies.

At a speed of 4.1 miles per second, DART will collide with the moonlet Dimorphos. That's a whopping 14,760 miles per hour. According to NASA, the impact should affect the moonlet's orbital speed by a fraction of a percent. Its orbital period should alter by several minutes as a result of this little adjustment. NASA will use telescopes on Earth to view and quantify the shift in Dimorphos' orbit around Didymos to determine whether the mission was successful.

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The binary asteroid system Didymos, which means "twin" in Greek, is the mission's objective. A near-Earth asteroid (65803) with a diameter of 0.48 miles (780 meters) and its moonlet Dimorphos with a diameter of 525 feet (160 meters) make up the system.

John Hopkin's Role In NASA DART Mission

The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is in charge of NASA's DART program. According to Space.com, DART departed its former home at JHUAPL in Maryland and traveled across the nation in the bed of a semi-trailer vehicle.

DART will be steered to its target Dimorphos by advanced autonomous navigation algorithms, according to JHUAPL. Finding a target with a diameter of 525 feet and a distance of 6.8 million miles from Earth is no simple task.

As the spacecraft approaches its target, DRACO, an onboard high-resolution camera, will assist in navigation and gather measurements of the target asteroid, including Dimorphos' size and form. According to another Space.com report, DRACO is based on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft's LORRI camera.

The DART spacecraft will not be traveling to the near-Earth asteroid pair by itself; instead, it will be accompanied by a Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging Asteroids. LICIACube is an Italian Space Agency-contributed CubeSat developed by Argotec, an Italian aerospace engineering firm.