DART Mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test)

• NASA’s DART Mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was a spacecraft designed to test a method of deflecting an asteroid for planetary defense, using the “kinetic impactor” technique (in simplest terms means smashing a thing into another thing).
  • It has two solar arrays and uses hydrazine propellant for maneuvering the spacecraft.
  • It also carries about 10 kg of xenon which will be used to demonstrate the agency’s new thrusters called NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster–Commercial (NEXT-C) in space.
    • NEXT-C gridded ion thruster system provides a combination of performance and spacecraft integration capabilities that make it uniquely suited for deep space robotic missions.
  • The spacecraft carries a high-resolution imager called Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO).
    • Images from DRACO will be sent to Earth in real-time and will help study the impact site and surface of Dimorphos (the target asteroid).
  • DART will also carry a small satellite or CubeSat named LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids).
    • LICIACube is expected to capture images of the impact and the impact crater formed as a result of the collision.
• DART was the first-ever space mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by kinetic impactor.
• The target of the spacecraft was a 160-meter-wide asteroid known as Dimorphos, which is a moonlet in orbit around the larger asteroid, Didymos.
• It was launched in November 2021.
• DART spacecraft successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022, altering the asteroid’s orbit by 33 minutes.
• It is the first time humanity intentionally changed the motion of a celestial object in space.

Objectives of DART Mission:

• The mission is to test the new technology to be prepared in case an asteroid heads towards Earth in the future.
• The aim is to test the newly developed technology that would allow a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid and change its course.
• The target of the spacecraft is a small moonlet called Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”).
  • Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos (Greek for “twin”).
• It is a suicide mission and the spacecraft will be completely destroyed.

Reason for Choosing Dimorphos

• The goal of the mission is to determine how much DART’s impact alters the moonlet’s velocity in space by measuring the change in its orbit around Didymos.
• Scientists think the collision will change the speed of Dimorphos by a fraction of one percent.
• It should alter the moonlet’s orbital period around the larger asteroid by several minutes – enough to be observed and measured by telescopes on Earth.