"Humanity has never done that before … this is stuff of science fiction." We are changing the motion of a natural celestial body in space," Statler said. It aims to change the speed of the moonlet, Dimorphos, by just a tiny percentage. And so there's no question that DART is going to run into a whole lot of material that can't get out of the way."ĭART won't change the orbit of Didymos. "The density of the DART spacecraft is actually not very different from the density of an asteroid. "We know that DART is going to be stopped by Dimorphos for one reason," Statler said. (Image: NASA/ JHUAPL)Īlthough it's never been done before, NSA DART scientist Tom Statler says the team has a good idea of what happens when you run a spacecraft into an asteroid because of NASA and Japanese Space Agency missions to other asteroids. The James Webb Space Telescope, ground-based observatories and other spacecraft will also be able to observe the asteroid impact from a distance.ĭART and LICIACube shown on a graphic with the binary asteroid system Didymos and Dimorphos. While DART will send back images until the end, its companion satellite, a tiny Italian CubeSat called LICIACube, will fly past the asteroid and continue to send back pictures in the days and months after the impact.
Because of the 8-second delay from DART's signal to Earth, photos will continue to come through into the mission operations center in Maryland.
The last image will be taken about 2.5 seconds before DART flies into the asteroid. "You'll hear us saying, 'We're precision lock, which means we are now starting to ignore Didymos, and we're going to Dimorphos … Then at two and a half minutes before impact Smart NAV … is going to turn off, and we're just going to point the camera and take the most amazing pictures of this asteroid that we're going to see for the first time," Adams said.ĭimorphos, only about 530-feet-wide, won't be fully in focus and clear until just moments before impact. The spacecraft will be sending back imagery at about one image per second. Using a relative-navigation system called SMART Nav, DART will hone in on Didymos about an hour before impact, and then slowly, the smaller Dimorphos will come into focus. IMAGES FROM ASTEROID-SMASHING DART MISSION EXPECTED TO BE 'STUNNING'ĭART Mission Systems Engineer Elena Adams with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, managing the mission for NASA, explains about 4 hours before impact, DART will be working autonomously to navigate to its end.
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