In an intense hunt for its asteroid target, NASA’s DART Mission Spacecraft has finally latched on.
NASA’s DART Mission spacecraft got its first look at Didymos, the two asteroid system that includes its target, the moon Dimorphos. Here’s all you need to know.
Amid news of NASA conducting the world’s first planetary defense test on September 26 with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission (DART), here’s an update regarding the spacecraft pillar. The DART spacecraft recently got its first look at Didymos, the two asteroid system that includes its target, Dimorphos. Follow information provided by NASA“On September 26, DART will intentionally crash into Dimorphos, Didymos’ lunar asteroid. The asteroid poses no threat to Earth, but this is the world’s first test of the technology. kinematics, using a spacecraft to deflect an asteroid to protect the planet.”
The light image from the asteroid Didymos and the moon orbiting its Dimorphos is a compilation of 243 images captured by the Didymos Asteroid and Reconnaissance Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO) on May 27. July 2022. NASA further announced that from this distance — about 20 million miles away from DART — the Didymos system is still very faint, and navigation camera experts are unsure if DRACO will be able to detect the asteroid. this or not. But when the 243 images DRACO took in this sequence of observations were combined, the team was able to enhance it to reveal Didymos and pinpoint its location.
“This first set of images is being used as a demonstration test,” said Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. our imaging techniques. “The quality of the images is similar to what we were able to obtain from ground-based telescopes, but it is important to show that DRACO is working well and can see its target to perform. make any necessary adjustments before we start using the image to guide the spacecraft into the asteroid autonomously,” she added.
While the team has conducted several navigation simulations using Didymos’s non-DRACO imagery, DART will ultimately depend on Didymos and Dimorphos’ vision and image processing capabilities, once it can too. is seen, to direct the spacecraft towards the asteroid. , especially in the last four hours before impact. At that point, DART will need to navigate itself to successfully interact with Dimorphos without any human intervention, NASA announced.
“When we first saw Didymos’ DRACO image, we were able to come up with the best settings for DRACO,” said Julie Bellerose, DART navigation team leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. and tweak the software.
Using observations made every five hours, the DART team will make three orbital adjustments over the next three weeks, each of which will reduce the margin of error to the orbit needed by the spacecraft to affect the orbit. motion. After the last maneuver on September 25, approximately 24 hours before impact, the navigation team would know the location of the Dimorphos target within 2 km. From there, DART will automatically guide itself to its collision with the lunar asteroid.
It is known that DRACO then observed Didymos during planned observations on August 12, August 13 and August 22.
