NASA sends DART to deflect asteroid

Dubbed DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), the mission launched yesterday (Wednesday 24 November 2021) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Built and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), DART is heading for Dimorphos, an asteroid that NASA said is not a threat to Earth. DART’s mission is to slightly change the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be measured using ground-based telescopes.

DART will show that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and collide with it. In doing so, DART will provide data to help better prepare for an asteroid that might pose an impact hazard to Earth, should one ever be discovered.

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Hitching a ride on DART is the Italian Space Agency (ASI)’s LICIACube, a CubeSat that will be released prior to DART’s impact to capture images of the impact and the resulting cloud of ejected matter. Roughly four years after DART’s impact, the European Space Agency’s Hera project will conduct detailed surveys of the impact, focussing on the crater left by DART’s collision and a precise determination of Dimorphos’ mass.