Three different spacecraft will be trying to watch when NASA's DART mission slams itself into the asteroid Dimorphos. Two of these spacecraft are the James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA DART Artist's Illustration
Lucy Asteroid Mission
According to Space.com, DART carried a tiny cubesat to document its dramatic end. Apart from the two telescopes, Lucy, a NASA asteroid mission, will also carry an instrument to observe the impact.
Lucy was launched in October 2021 to study asteroids that orbit the sun at the same distance as Jupiter and are thought to hold information about the early days of the solar system.
But, for the time being, Lucy is still close to Earth because it needs to conduct a flyby next month to set its trajectory out to its targets, so it may be able to catch the impact. Earth will be about 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) away from Didymos at the time of impact; Lucy will be about twice as far away and at a different viewing angle.
Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore and the coordination lead for DART, said that this is a unique opportunity and a unique moment to take all the resources that they possibly can to maximize what they have learned.
Expected Output of the DART Mission
Three minutes after launch, mission personnel hope to see images of the impact site. According to NASA, this is possible through the cubesat called LICIA Cube, which DART deployed earlier this month. Beginning in late 2026, the European Space Agency will also send a separate mission, Hera, to study the site in depth.
Although DART personnel only need to measure the change in Dimorphos' orbit to determine whether the mission was successful, scientists are hoping to learn more about the moonlet's rotation and structure.
In addition to the immediate aftermath of the impact, the telescopes will periodically check in on Dimorphos until the end of the year. It will supplement ongoing ground observations.
Whatever the results of the spacecraft observations are, the rest of us will have to watch from the safety of Earth. According to MSN, NASA has set up a special video feed to livestream DART's views of Dimorphos as it approaches impact, with a new image sent every second until the spacecraft shuts down.
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Telescope Challenges
Chabot said watching DART is not what JWST is designed to do. The scientist said that this was a challenging measurement for them. Dimorphos is much closer and moves much faster than the distant galaxies at the heart of JWST's work. The telescopes will be looking and the scientists will see what they get.
The JWST faces a second challenge, and it must regularly check in on guide stars and readjust, which means that observations may begin a few minutes after impact.
Hubble will have its own constraints as well because it will be on the wrong side of the Earth at the time of impact, but it will begin observations about 15 minutes later.
Tom Statler, DART program scientist, said Hubble won't actually catch the exact moment of impact. Hubble will have its own constraints because it will be on the wrong side of the Earth at the time of impact, but it will begin observations about 15 minutes later.
Yet, Statler said that it is OK because they don't really expect anything to be really observable from the exact moment of impact.
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