Roughly four years after DART’s impact, ESA’s (European Space Agency) Hera project will conduct detailed surveys of both asteroids, with particular focus on the crater left by DART’s collision and a precise determination of Dimorphos’ mass. LICIACube, a CubeSat riding with DART provided by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), will be released prior to DART’s impact to capture images of the impact and the resulting cloud of ejected matter.

The test will provide important data to help better prepare for an asteroid that might pose an impact hazard to Earth, should one ever be discovered. Its goal is to slightly change the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be accurately measured using ground-based telescopes.ĭART will show that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it – a method of deflection called kinetic impact. Just one part of NASA’s larger planetary defense strategy, DART – built and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland – will impact a known asteroid that is not a threat to Earth.

EST on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards, launched Wednesday at 1:21 a.m. 23, 2021, carrying NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Mission spacecraft. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Nov.

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