![]() DART's final moments in detailĪ month prior to its impact, the DART probe began sending home pictures once every five hours, which were processed by a ground optical navigation team, researchers report in the new papers.Ībout four hours before impact, researchers handed over control to DART and allowed it to navigate itself using its autonomous SMART Nav system, which also processed images onboard to first identify Didymos and later Dimorphos. "This situation is rare for planetary exploration, and is very exciting!" Carolyn Ernst, a planetary scientist at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and a co-author of one of the studies, told in an email. Hera is expected to study the Didymos-Dimorphos system in detail, including the crater formed by DART's plunge. The latest results focus on reconstructing DART's final moments precise calculations of how much the spacecraft changed the orbit of its target Dimorphos' puzzling twin tails and key mission moments captured by a network of citizen science telescopes worldwide.Īlthough researchers are still studying the DART data, they are already developing a sequel mission: the European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in October 2024 and reach Didymos two years later. Related: Behold the 1st images of DART's wild asteroid crash! In the five studies, astronomers shared additional findings from the mission using data the probe sent home up in the leadup to its colllision with Dimorphos, a moon of the 2,560-foot-wide (780 meters) asteroid Didymos, on Sept. Those two studies are part of a raft of five DART papers published online Wednesday (March 1) in the journal Nature. The mission's resounding success shows that a "kinetic impactor" like DART is a "viable technique to potentially defend Earth if necessary," researchers note in another new study. " DART has successfully done both," astronomers report in a new study. ![]() NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission had two main goals: to show that an asteroid could be targeted in a high-speed encounter, and to demonstrate that the target's orbit could be changed - a technique astronomers hope to use for planetary defense should a dangerous space rock come our way.
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