DART: Six Months After Impact

On September 26, 2022, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, making history as humanity’s first demonstration of asteroid deflection. Since then, the team has been busy analyzing the data from the camera onboard the DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube); making continued observations with Earth- and space-based telescopes; and modeling DART’s impact event, the ejecta evolution, and dynamics.

The team previously announced that Dimorphos’ orbital period was changed by the DART impact by 33 minutes, indicating that the ejecta contributed significantly to enhance the deflection produced by the spacecraft. This press event will share the latest results, from reconstructing the details of DART’s impact with the asteroid’s surface and simulating DART’s kinetic impact using that information to analyzing the rich LICIACube dataset and sharing the latest Hubble Space Telescope observations of the Didymos-Dimorphos system. These results are being used to fully understand DART’s impact event and its implications for future planetary defense applications if such a need should arise.

Видео DART: Six Months After Impact канала Lunar and Planetary Institute