In Three Days, Now: WHAM! DART Will Impact Asteroid Dimorphos -- A Celestial Object...

As our fine anon. commenter reminds. . . Monday is a big day, out in deep space. We will likely see a small impactor spacecraft slam into an asteroid to change its trajectory. [The impact will be early evening Eastern, and we may start to see photos by late night Monday.] All in all, an amazing time to be alive!

The goal of the Johns Hopkins-infused NASA mission is of course to test whether we may safely alter the near Earth orbital path. . . of a smallish asteroid. . . by directly ramming into it, at a precise angle of inflection.

We've covered it since August of 2020. . . but the time is finally here:

. . .As NASA’s DART spacecraft cruises toward its highly-anticipated Sept. 26 encounter with the binary asteroid Didymos, the spacecraft’s imager — the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation, or DRACO — has snapped thousands of pictures of stars. The pictures give the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) team leading the mission for NASA the data necessary to support ongoing spacecraft testing and rehearsals in preparation for the spacecraft’s kinetic impact into Dimorphos, the moon of Didymos.

As the only instrument on DART, DRACO will capture images of Didymos and Dimorphos; it will also support the spacecraft's autonomous guidance system — the Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation (SMART Nav) — to guide DART to impact. . . .

Now. . . we wait -- for Monday, and the images and movies to come. . . streaming back to us, in Ultra-HD!



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