DART will be an audacious, truly amazingly explosive experiment: what happens when a spacecraft zipping along at 15,000 miles an hour. . . slams into a smallish asteroid? Will the asteroid's eliptical orbital path be deflected, a la (but not really) the old movie "Armageddon"? We shall. . . see:
. . .Dangling from a crane inside one of the high bays at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids, or LICIACube, was ready for installation on NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft. Ever so carefully, a team of American and Italian engineers maneuvered the 6U CubeSat, weighing 31 pounds (14 kilograms) and measuring roughly the length of an adult’s hand and forearm, into place. . . .
It took the team around an hour to get the box precisely aligned and screw in the final bolt. But by 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 8, LICIACube was fully integrated, putting into place the last major piece of the spacecraft and culminating months of environmental tests and analyses as each of DART’s components have been mounted.
Contributed by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and designed, built and operated by the Italian aerospace engineering company Argotec, LICIACube (pronounced LEE-cha-cube) has the important task of watching DART’s final maneuver – a deliberate crash into an asteroid – and its effects.
“Seeing LICIACube installed on DART was exciting because this mission breaks new ground for ASI and the whole Italian space sector,” said Simone Pirrotta, LICIACube Project Manager for ASI. “It will be the first Italian satellite ever to operate in deep space, requiring the training of a large and motivated national team that is now well qualified to tackle similar challenges in the future.”
The mission objective of DART, which was designed, built and is managed by APL, is to determine whether flying a spacecraft into a small solar system body at speeds of about 15,000 miles per hour could be a reliable technique to deflect an asteroid if such a hazard were ever discovered to be on a collision course with Earth.
The mission’s target is a binary asteroid system — Didymos and its small moonlet asteroid Dimorphos. Neither poses a threat to Earth, but their orbit around the Sun swings them close enough to the planet that ground-based telescopes can observe the aftermath of DART’s collision and calculate how effective it was at changing Dimorphos’ path. Those observations, along with DART’s main imager DRACO—the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation—will ultimately achieve all of DART’s mission objectives. But the images LICIACube captures will significantly enhance the mission’s overall knowledge return, and hope to provide spectacular testament of its success. . . .
Now you know -- out grinning, into the sunshine here.
नमस्ते
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