nasa dart mission launches into asteroid

10, engineers will “mate” the spacecraft to the adapter that stacks on top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Engineers loaded the xenon before the spacecraft left APL in early October. DART also carries about 130 pounds (60 kilograms) of xenon for the NEXT-C ion engine. Two days later, the team received the green light to fill DART’s fuel tank with roughly 110 pounds (50 kilograms) of hydrazine propellant for spacecraft maneuvers and attitude control. DART team members have since been preparing the spacecraft for flight, testing the spacecraft’s mechanisms and electrical system, wrapping the final parts in multilayer insulation blankets, and practicing the launch sequence from both the launch site and the mission operations center at APL.ĭART headed to the SpaceX Payload Processing Facility on VSFB on Oct. The spacecraft arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) near Lompoc, California, in early October after a cross-country drive. “But the reason why we succeeded so far is because our team is excited, extremely sharp, and they genuinely want to show that if an asteroid was coming toward Earth, we could prevent a catastrophe.” “It’s a miracle what this team has accomplished, with all of the obstacles in the way like COVID and the development of so many new technologies,” said Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

Engineers outfitted the spacecraft with the various technologies that the mission will test, including NASA’s NEXT-C ion propulsion system that was designed to improve performance and fuel efficiency for deep-space missions, and a flat, slotted high-gain antenna for efficient communication between Earth and the spacecraft.ĭuring the summer and early September, engineers installed the spacecraft’s onboard camera DRACO (its only instrument), its two roll-out solar arrays that each unfurl to 28 feet, and the Italian Space Agency’s miniature satellite LICIACube that is designed to capture images of DART’s kinetic impact and its immediate aftereffects. Over the last year and a half, while following pandemic health and safety protocols, engineers built DART from a collection of parts to a fully assembled spacecraft. “This technique is thought to be the most technologically mature approach for mitigating a potentially hazardous asteroid, and it will help planetary defense experts refine asteroid kinetic impactor computer models, giving insight into how we could deflect potentially dangerous near-Earth objects in the future.” “DART will be the first demonstration of the ‘kinetic impactor’ technique in which a spacecraft deliberately collides with a known asteroid at high speed to change the asteroid’s motion in space,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer.

Then, using Earth-based telescopes to measure the effects of the impact on the asteroid system, the mission will enhance modeling and predictive capabilities to help us better prepare for an actual asteroid threat should one ever be discovered. While neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth, DART’s kinetic impact will prove that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and kinetically impact it. U003cstrongu003eu003cemu003eNASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitmanu003c/emu003eu003c/strongu003eĭART will be the world’s first planetary defense test mission, heading for the small moonlet asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger companion asteroid called Didymos, and intentionally crashing into the asteroid to slightly change its orbit.

Nasa dart mission launches into asteroid