NASA’s DART mission will deliberately crash into an asteroid’s moon
CNN — A spacecraft that will deliberately crash into an asteroid is preparing to launch. The DART mission, or NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, will lift off at 10:20 p.m. PT on November 23 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. “As such, it will be the first object to be known to humans by two, very different forms, the one seen by DART before impact and the other seen by the European Space Agency’s Hera, a few years later.” This is an illustration of NASA's DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos system. “That’s the key measurement that will tell us how the asteroid responded to our deflection effort.” A few years after the impact, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will conduct a follow-up investigation of Didymos and Dimorphos. While the DART mission was developed for NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office and managed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the mission’s team will work with the Hera mission team under an international collaboration known as the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment, or AIDA.
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