DART will slam into Dimorphos, the moonlet of a near-Earth asteroid called Didymos . If successful, the spacecraft will alter the path of Dimorphos in its orbit around Didymos; just how much Dimorphos' orbit changes will be confirmed in the months and years after impact.
NASA plans to host a hybrid media day at the Applied Physics Laboratory "focused on the technology enabling the DART spacecraft to autonomously navigate to and impact its target asteroid." That event will kick off with a media teleconference about the DART mission, its goals and status.
NASA's Asteroid-Smashing DART Spacecraft Snaps First Look at Its Target - CNET
On Wednesday, NASA released DART's first view of its target, a long-distance look at the Didymos system. DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Mission. The spacecraft will fling itself into Dimorphos to try to change its orbit around Didymos.
The image shows the asteroid system as a tiny dot of light against the backdrop of space. The composite is made up of 243 images snapped by DART's onboard Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) on July 27 from a distance of 20 million miles (32 million kilometers) away.
DART sets sights on asteroid target
From this distance—about 20 million miles away from DART—the Didymos system is still very faint, and navigation camera experts were uncertain whether DRACO would be able to spot the asteroid yet.
"This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques ," said Elena Adams, the DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
NASA's asteroid-slamming DART spacecraft catches 1st look at target (photo)
The image, which is a composite of 243 individual images, comes from DART's sole instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO); it was taken on July 27 and released on Wednesday (Sept. 7).
"This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques," DART mission systems engineer Elena Adams of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, which is managing the mission, said in a statement .
NASA's DART Spacecraft Gets A First Look At The Asteroid It Will Smash Into To Save Earth | ...
NASA's DART Spots Its Target Asteroid Ahead Of Collision [Photo]
The "first-ever" mission to redirect an asteroid's motion is currently underway. NASA has now shared another first: a photo of the target asteroid captured by the mission spacecraft itself.
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test ( DART ) spacecraft is currently on its way to the near-Earth asteroid binary system Didymos. This is comprised of the 780-meter Didymos and 160-meter Dimorphos, the latter being the target of the DART mission.
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