Andrew Wade

Space mission aiming to deflect asteroid moon

News

NASA and the European Space Agency have launched a mission to divert the orbit of an asteroid’s small moon by crashing a spacecraft into it.

The AIDA (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment) mission will send a pair of spacecraft - the ESA-led Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) and NASA-led Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – to rendezvous with the Didymos asteroid and its small natural satellite, known as ‘Didymoon’.

Following a period of study of both asteroids and detailed mapping of Didymoon by AIM, DART will impact with Didymoon and AIM will assess the mission’s effectiveness in diverting the moon’s orbit around Didymos. The AIDA mission is being discussed at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2015 in Nantes, France.

Patrick Michel, the lead of the AIM Investigation Team, said, “To protect Earth from potentially hazardous impacts, we need to understand asteroids much better – what they are made of, their structure, origins and how they respond to collisions.

“AIDA will be the first mission to study an asteroid binary system, as well as the first to test whether we can deflect an asteroid through an impact with a spacecraft.

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