When NASA’s DART spacecraft smashes into asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26, it should have a silent witness: An Italian cubesat known as LICIACube will watch the ground-breaking experiment in actual time for keen scientists on Earth.
LICIACube, or the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids, is a 31-pound (14 kilograms) micro-satellite that has hitched a experience on DART (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test) to the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid system. DART deployed the cubesat on Sunday (Sept. 11) at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT) to present LICIACube 15 days to imagine a protected place to watch DART’s collision with Dimorphos. The affect is a first-of-its sort experiment designed to change the orbit of a space rock in an important take a look at of a planetary defense idea that will one day save the lives of tens of millions of individuals on Earth.
“LICIACube will be released from the dispenser on one of DART’s external panels, and will be guided (braking and rotating) to start its autonomous journey toward Dimorphos,” Elena Mazzotta Epifani, an astronomer at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and a co-investigator on the LICIACube mission, informed Space.com in an e mail. “The cubesat will point its cameras toward the asteroid system, but also to DART, and will probably take some pictures of it.”
Related: NASA’s DART asteroid-impact mission explained in pictures
The solely first-hand witness
LICIACube, fitted with two optical cameras, will comply with DART towards Dimorphos and ultimately settle in to look at the drama from a protected distance of 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) because the 1,345-pound (610 kg) spacecraft hits the rock on Sept. 26, Mazzotta Epifani added. “The DART impact will be [seen] as an increase of the target luminosity by comparing images of Dimorphos taken before and after the impact,” she wrote.
At the time of the affect, Dimorphos and Didymos can be about 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth, according to NASA (opens in new tab). Although Earth-based astronomers will be unable to see the affect, they’ll intently observe the system within the following weeks to find out whether or not the 12-hour orbit of the 560-foot-wide (170 meters) Dimorphos across the 2,600 foot-wide (800 m) Didymos may have sped up as anticipated. They will do this by measuring the intervals between the intervals of temporary dimming that happen when the 2 asteroids eclipse one another.
But though such observations is perhaps sufficient to substantiate that the experiment labored, they might not present any element of the consequences of DART’s affect on the asteroid. And so, proper after DART smashes into Dimorphos, LICIACube will transfer nearer to examine the scene.
“LICIACube will … perform a ‘fast fly-by’ around 3 minutes after DART impact at a minimum distance of about 55 km [34 miles] from Dimorphos’ surface at its closest approach,” Mazzotta Epifani wrote. “The image acquisition by the two cameras onboard will be almost continuous for around 10 minutes and will be devoted to the target impact and non-impact sides, as well as to the plume produced by the DART impact.”
LICIACube will then ship the pictures to Earth, however Mazzotta Epifani warned it would take weeks to get down all the info.
We know nothing about Dimorphos
Understanding the consequences of DART’s affect on Dimorphos in depth is essential as an analogous system would possibly one day be wanted to deflect a rock on a collision course with Earth. An asteroid the dimensions of Dimorphos may trigger a continent-wide destruction whereas the affect of 1 the dimensions of the bigger Didymos may very well be felt worldwide.
But there is a catch: Although astronomers know in nice element orbits of many of the 26,115 at the moment recognized near-Earth asteroids (2,000 of that are labeled as “potentially hazardous” because of their measurement and closest strategy to Earth), they know surprisingly little about these rocks. In specific, scientists do not perceive the density of the fabric the rocks are made from and might solely guess how the floor would possibly behave upon affect.
The staff behind NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which touched down on the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in October 2020, skilled firsthand the pitfalls of those unknowns. The asteroid’s unexpectedly comfortable floor almost swallowed up the spacecraft, the landing producing what OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta described as “a huge wall of debris” that would simply have destroyed the spacecraft.
Lauretta, a planetary scientist on the University of Arizona, told Space.com when the incident was introduced it urged a deflection try is perhaps tougher than thought, since soft-surfaced asteroids may simply take in the affect.
The staff behind DART is aware of simply as little about Dimorphos because the OSIRIS-REx staff knew about Bennu earlier than the spacecraft arrived on the asteroid. The photos captured by DART itself earlier than the affect and subsequently by LICIACube, would be the first detailed views of Dimorphos astronomers will ever see.
“We know general surface properties of the larger Didymos, thanks to ground-based spectroscopic and photometric measurements, but we do not know almost anything about Dimorphos, which is too small to produce an effect disentangled from the one coming from the main body,” Mazzotta Epifani wrote. “We *presume* from theoretical models on formation of binary asteroids that Dimorphos is very similar to Didymos, but we know virtually nothing about the degree of cohesion of surface materials, the size distribution of the surface debris, and so on.”
Scientists assume Dimorphos is a so-called “rubble pile asteroid” like Bennu: a conglomeration of boulders and dust that broke off prior to now from the primary asteroid Didymos and is now solely held collectively by the drive of gravity. Since the asteroid is quite small, this drive is kind of feeble. For this motive, astronomers do not perceive the affect that DART may have, how a lot matter it should throw up into space and the way massive a crater it would depart behind.
Lessons for the longer term
“Together, DART and LICIACube will analyze for the first time and with high detail the physical properties of a binary near-Earth asteroid, allowing us to investigate its nature and have hints on its formation and evolution,” Mazzotta Epifani wrote. “LICIACube will obtain multiple images of the ejecta plume produced by the impact itself, of the DART impact [crater] size, as well as the non-impact hemisphere to help us to study the size and morphology of the crater and the effects on the surface properties in the surroundings.”
The excellent news is that the extra info scientists collect, the higher they’ll be capable of predict results of attainable future interventions on comparable asteroids.
The Italian Space Agency, which oversees the LICIACube mission at the moment evaluates plans to increase the mission to conduct different research of the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid system, Mazzotta Epifani wrote, including that any choices on prolonging the mission past the quick aftermath of the affect will solely be made after Sept. 26.
Italy’s first deep space mission
For the Italians, who’ve a burgeoning space business that has contributed to among the most high-profile European space initiatives (together with the European Columbus module of the International Space Station), LICIACube is the primary deep-space mission the nation will function by itself. Developed and in-built lower than three and a half years, LICIACube is much like ArgoMoon, one of many cubesats hitching a ride to the moon on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, which remains to be waiting for lift off after a gas leak stopped a launch try on Sept. 3.
“LICIACube is not only the first mission in deep space that Italy will operate, it is also the first fully designed, realized and managed in Italy, including data reception and management,” Mazzotta Epifani wrote.
With LICIACube, Italy stepped in to fill the hole created by price range approval delays within the European Space Agency’s (ESA) HERA mission, a a lot bigger spacecraft, which was initially supposed to reach on the Didymos-Dimorphos duo earlier than the DART affect to examine the system after which observe the crash and research its aftermath intimately. ESA still plans to launch HERA, however the spacecraft is not going to attain Didymos earlier than 2027.
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