DART will hit its target on September 26, 2022.
Two weeks after launch, NASA’s DART spacecraft, the first planetary defense mission, whose objective is to deflect an asteroid, has sent its first images to Earth.
After the violent vibrations of the launch and the extreme temperature change to minus 80 degrees Celsius in space, and because the components of the spacecraft’s telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a small Moving something on the DART DRACO telescope camera could be very serious.
On December 7, the spacecraft opened the circular door that covered the opening of DRACO and transmitted the first image of its surrounding environment. Taken about 3 million kilometers (11 light seconds) from Earth, very close, astronomically speaking, the image shows a dozen stars, clear and sharp against the black background of space, close to where the constellations of Perseus intersect, Aries and Taurus.
The DART navigation team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the stars in the image to accurately determine how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointing relative to the spacecraft. With those measurements in hand, the DART team could precisely move the spacecraft to target DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, which DART captured in another image on December 10.
Located in the constellation Auriga, the star cluster is about 4,200 light years from Earth. The intentional capture of images with many stars like M38 helps the team to characterize the optical imperfections in the images, as well as to calibrate how absolutely bright an object is – all important details for precise measurements when DRACO begins to take images of the destination of the image. spacecraft, the Didymos binary asteroid system, NASA reports.
DRACO (short for Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation) is a high-resolution camera inspired by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft imager that produced the first close-up images of the Pluto system and an object in the Kuiper belt, Arrokoth. As DART’s only instrument, DRACO will capture images of the asteroid Didymos and its lunar asteroid Dimorphos, as well as support the spacecraft’s autonomous guidance system to direct DART to its final kinetic impact.
DART is the world’s first planetary defense test mission, which will intentionally execute a kinetic impact on Dimorphos to slightly change its movement in space. While none of these asteroids pose a threat to Earth, the DART mission will demonstrate that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate towards a kinetic impact on a relatively small target asteroid, and that this is a viable technique to deflect a truly dangerous asteroid. , if one is ever discovered. DART will reach its target on September 26, 2022. (I)
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