This NASA spacecraft will smash into

an asteroid—to practice saving Earth

The DART mission will try to alter a harmless asteroid’s orbit, a technology
that could one day defend Earth from armageddon.
BYMICHAEL GRESHKO

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 23, 2021

• 11 MIN READ

Like many of the solar system’s rocky objects, Earth bears the scars of
past asteroid impacts—including some wallops that shaped the arc of
life itself. Some 66 million years ago, for instance, a six-mile-wide
asteroid slammed into Earth near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula,
triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.

Now for the first time in our planet’s history, Earth is going to hit
back.

At 10:21 p.m. Pacific Time on November 23, a NASA mission called

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) launched from Vandenberg
Space Force Base, California, to embark on a nearly year-long voyage
around the sun. If all goes well, DART’s journey will end on the
evening of September 26, 2022, when the golf cart-size spacecraft will
intentionally slam into a little, unsuspecting asteroid called
Dimorphos.

Dimorphos is a harmless space potato, a 525-foot-wide “moonlet”

that orbits a bigger asteroid called Didymos every 11 hours and 55
minutes. DART’s mission is to smash into Dimorphos at roughly
15,000 miles an hour, altering the moonlet’s orbit around its parent
body. The name Dimorphos, Greek for “having two forms,” was
chosen because the asteroid will have one form before DART and one
form after.
Moving an Asteroid
Astronomers think there could be thousands of asteroids large enough to cause
catastrophic damage if they impacted Earth. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection
Test (DART) mission will attempt to slightly alter the trajectory of the moonlet of an
asteroid, hopefully proving our ability to deflect a potentially harmful impact.
Didymos
(asteroid)
Dimorphos
(moonlet)
530 feet in diameter
Not to scale.
Impact with
moonlet
DART spacecraft
Traveling more than 4.1 miles per second and weighing 1,100 pounds, its impact with Dimorphos is
expected to slow the speed of
the moonlet by less than 0.2 inches per second, enough to alter the rotation around Didymos by
up to 10 minutes.
LICIACube
Built by the Italian Space Agency, this CubeSat will separate from the DART spacecraft before impact
and relay images back to Earth.
DART is scheduled to impact with Didymos next fall
Launch
November 2021
SUN
Impact
Fall 2022
Jason Treat, NG Staff.
Source: NASA

DART’s collision with Dimorphos will destroy the spacecraft, but it

should also cause the moonlet to settle into a tighter, shorter orbit
around Didymos, which astronomers will measure with Earth-based
telescopes. The $330-million mission is the first full test of
technologies that could be used to avert a future asteroid impact—a
natural hazard that, unlike earthquakes and volcanoes, humans can
forecast many years ahead of time.

“This is a mission for planet Earth—all the peoples of the Earth—

because we would all be threatened,” says NASA Administrator Bill
Nelson. “I’m pretty charged about DART. … If they connect me to
where I can watch this thing [collide], I guarantee you, I will be glued
to a screen.”

Didymos and Dimorphos pose no threat to Earth, and no known

asteroid is destined to collide with our planet for at least hundreds of
years. But experts often say that it’s a matter of when, not if, Earth
finds itself in the celestial shooting gallery.
“I tell people that planetary defense or near-Earth observations are
not the highest-priority thing that NASA needs to be doing—but the
day will come when it may be the most important thing that NASA
does,” says the space agency’s planetary defense officer Lindley
Johnson.

Near-Earth objects
A DART-like deflector is only as effective as our surveys of the sky—
the key to buying time. “DART is probably the high-profile end of
planetary defense, but it’s only one part of planetary defense,” says
DART coordination lead Nancy Chabot, a scientist at the Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel,
Maryland.

For decades NASA and other space agencies have been searching for
asteroids whose paths cross the orbit of Earth and predicting their
future movements. The goal is to understand the risks we face over
centuries so we’re not caught unawares.

“The Hollywood movies make it very dramatic and entertaining, but

in the real world, we don’t want to be in that situation,” Johnson says.

So far astronomers have found 890 near-Earth asteroids bigger than

a kilometer (0.6 miles) wide, more than 95 percent of the expected
total—and none of them will pose an impact risk for at least the next
few centuries. However, asteroids as small as 140 meters (460 feet)
wide could still devastate an area the size of some U.S. states, and
many of these objects have yet to be discovered. Computer models
suggest that there are roughly 25,000 near-Earth asteroids that are at
least 140 meters wide, and as of late 2021, we’ve found only about
10,000 of them.

Upcoming observatories, including a planned NASA space telescope

called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, should accelerate the pace of
discovery. If astronomers using these instruments find an asteroid
whose orbit intersects with Earth’s, humankind’s response will
depend on how much advance notice we have. 

If a large asteroid were discovered only a few months before impact,

one of our only options would be to detonate nuclear weapons next to
the object. X-rays from the blast would vaporize parts of the
asteroid’s surface, creating ejecta that would act like rocket thrust and
nudge the asteroid, hopefully enough to get it off a collision course.

But if an asteroid that’s not too big were found well ahead of its
forecasted impact, then the solution requires no nukes. A zippy
spacecraft like DART—called a “kinetic impactor”—could be sent to
collide with the asteroid and slightly tweak its orbit. Over many years,
that small deviation would add up to a major change in the asteroid’s
path, enough to render the object harmless.

Crash test
The researchers at APL who built the spacecraft have spent more than
a decade thinking through how binary asteroid systems like Didymos
and Dimorphos could provide a useful, safe place to test a kinetic
impactor. Adjusting an asteroid’s orbit around the sun could have
unforeseen consequences, such as unintentionally putting it on a far-
future collision course with Earth. Instead, DART will tweak the orbit
of a smaller asteroid around a bigger asteroid, with practically no
effect on the binary pair’s overall path.

The most daunting technical challenge DART faces: pinpointing

Dimorphos’s position as the spacecraft careens toward it at nearly
15,000 miles an hour. “We have no clue what Dimorphos actually
looks like,” says APL’s Elena Adams, the mission system engineer for
DART. “It could be a dog bone; it could be a doughnut.” 

To ensure that DART hits its mark, mission engineers developed a

guidance system called SMART Nav that will let the spacecraft
autonomously home in on Dimorphos using an onboard telescope.

For most of its journey, DART will have remarkably little to go on.
The spacecraft won’t be able to see the larger asteroid Didymos until
four hours before impact, and Dimorphos itself won’t pop into view
until an hour before showtime. By the time DART finishes its final
trajectory corrections—with two minutes and 500 miles until oblivion
—Dimorphos will be just 41 pixels across in DART’s field of view.

As it screams toward the target, DART will send back as many images
of Dimorphos as it can, possibly as many as one every 2.5 seconds
before impact. The terrain captured in these final images will be
crucial to understanding the blow that DART deals to its target
because the amount of ejecta thrown off the asteroid will depend on
where the spacecraft hits.

“There’s a lot of sensitivity to the details of where it lands: if it

happens to land on a boulder, or if it happens to land in finer
materials,” says Megan Bruck Syal, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory who studies asteroid deflection simulations. 

Exactly how much DART will nudge Dimorphos is unclear, but the
spacecraft’s creators are confident that it will pack plenty of punch.
For NASA to consider DART a success, the impact will need to
shorten Dimorphos’s orbit around Didymos by at least 73 seconds.
DART’s team predicts that the spacecraft could shave off as much as
10 minutes.

Following up
DART won’t be alone in its final moments. About 10 days before
impact, the spacecraft will eject a small CubeSat called LICIACube.
Built and operated by the Italian Space Agency, LICIACube will fly
past Dimorphos 165 seconds after DART makes contact.

Along the way, the little spacecraft will take pictures of Dimorphos’s
newly marred surface and the impact’s ballooning plume of debris.
LICIACube could even capture the flash of light from the impact. “We
are the real-time witness,” says Simone Pirrotta, the Italian Space
Agency’s project manager for LICIACube.

The CubeSat’s vantage point is crucial to DART’s mission: Scientists

need to have a precise accounting of how much momentum DART
transferred to Dimorphos, which means they must watch for the
growing shroud of ejecta that the collision will spray out. 

“It’s going to blast many tons of material off—maybe thousands of

tons—and we need to know how much material there is, how fast it’s
going, and where it’s headed,” APL’s Andy Cheng, a DART
investigation team lead, said in a November 4 press briefing.

For several weeks, LICIACube will transmit data back to Earth, and
then it will continue to drift through the solar system, its purpose
fulfilled. But it won’t be the last spacecraft to gaze upon the surface of
Dimorphos. The European Space Agency is working on a follow-up
mission called Hera, which will launch in 2024. Hera will perform a
more thorough survey of Dimorphos, poring over the moonlet’s
surface like a crime scene investigator.

Beyond advancing planetary defense, DART, LICIACube, and Hera

will fill a major scientific gap by visiting a binary asteroid system.
Such a visit has happened only once before: In 1993 NASA’s Galileo
spacecraft flew by the asteroid Ida on its way to Jupiter, where it
discovered the asteroid had a moonlet, now called Dactyl. “Science-
wise, we have never visited a binary asteroid on purpose,” says APL
scientist and DART investigation team lead Andy Rivkin.

Understanding how moonlets like Dimorphos form will give scientists

insight into the formation mechanisms at play in the early solar
system, when the planets themselves accreted from smaller bits of
material. Rivkin adds that since roughly 10 to 15 percent of all
asteroids are binaries, there is a reasonable chance that Earth’s next
major asteroid threat could be a binary—making study of these
celestial pairs all the more important. 

For Chabot, DART’s biggest promise lies in being the first of many
missions focused on averting a possible asteroid apocalypse. “It’s not
just an end in itself,” she says. “It’s opening up a whole new
beginning.”