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Live asteroid impact11/21/2023 ![]() In the weeks following DART’s kinetic impact, when the asteroid pair was within 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) of Earth, a world-wide team of astronomers used dozens of telescopes stationed around the world and in space to study the Didymos asteroid system. Fifteen days before impact, DART’s CubeSat companion Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), provided by the Italian Space Agency, deployed from the spacecraft to capture images of DART’s impact and of the asteroid’s resulting cloud of ejected matter. ![]() Final DRACO images obtained by the spacecraft seconds before impact revealed the surface of Dimorphos in close-up detail. DART’s sole instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) – working together with a sophisticated guidance, navigation and control system that worked in tandem with Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation (SMART Nav) algorithms – enabled DART to identify and distinguish between the two asteroids, target the smaller object, and guide the 1,260-pound (570-kilogram) box-shaped spacecraft through the final 56,000 miles (90,000 kilometers) of space into Dimorphos at roughly 14,000 miles (22,530 kilometers) per hour. The mission’s one-way trip confirmed NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to change its orbital path. Neither Didymos nor Dimorphos pose an impact threat to Earth before or after DART’s kinetic impact demonstration. ![]() Dimorphos orbits a larger 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos and is part of the Didymos binary asteroid system. Launched November 24, 2022, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, DART traveled for over 10 months before intentionally colliding with the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small celestial object just 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), built and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), was the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration that validated one technique of asteroid deflection using a kinetic impactor spacecraft.
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