Dart: Smashing Asteroids

 Dart: Smashing Asteroids

Introduction

All good things have their downside. Asteroids too. Yes, we can study a lot about our universe using them. But imagine, the earth lost the dinosaurs due to an asteroid. NASA is always streaming on their channel about an asteroid that may hit the earth. But now, NASA has a solution to that, DART. And yes, NASA has always been good at names. DART’s mission is like a dart which shoots itself at a goal and DART will do the same but at a larger scope. On the other hand, DART also means the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. So read on to get more information on this spacecraft…

Image Source - Google | Image by - Planetary Society | The DART

Structure and anatomy of DART

The rocket which is taking DART is the Falcon 9. The DART spacecraft has a mass of 610 kg. Many of its parts include a sun sensor, and a star sensor called SMARTNav software. Acronyms again! SMARTNav stands for Small-body Manoeuvring Autonomous Real-Time Navigation. It also has a 20 cm aperture camera named  Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO). And DRACO is based on the LORRI which was in the New Horizon spacecraft and as L’LORRI in the Lucy spacecraft. The feature I like about it the most is that it has autonomous navigation and it needs that feature to hit the centre of Didymos, the moon of Dimorphos. The best part is the roll-out solar wings. They are like a mat attached to the satellite which opens up as the satellite is deployed. And they are very light too!

Stages of dart

Date (before impact)	Distance	Asteroid size (As observed by the DRACO camera)	Events
T-30 days	—	—	The DRACO camera detects Didymos
T-10 days	—	—	Ejection of the LICIACube Nano-satellite maneuvers to avoid crashing into the asteroid.
T-4 hours	—	—	Start of autonomous navigation (SMART Nav software)
T-60 mins	24,000 km (15,000 mi)	Didymos: 6.5 pixels Dimorphos: 1.4 pixels	The DRACO camera detects Dimorphos
T-4 mins	1,600 km (990 mi)	Didymos: 99 pixels Dimorphos: 21 pixels	Start of last course correction
T-2 mins	800 km (500 mi)	Didymos: 99 pixels Dimorphos: 21 pixels	End of last course correction
T-20 seconds	130 km (81 mi)	Dimorphos: 300 pixels	The photos taken reach the expected spatial resolution.
T-0	0 km (0 mi)		Impacting Dimorphous.
T+3 minutes			Flyby of the asteroid by LICIACube.

Image Source - Google | Image by - Wikipedia | The DART tour

LICIACube

The DART mission has a passenger known as LICIACube or Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids. Because the DART satellite would just be crashing itself it wouldn’t be able to show what had happened after the crash so 10 days before crashing a small CubeSat will be deployed from DART which will take images of the crash and send them back to NASA. It has two optical cameras, LUKE and LEIA.

Image Source - Google | Image by - Wikipedia | The LICIACube

The DART mission will show us the way through which we will be able to protect our planet from asteroid dangers. And we are humans and our work is not to accept defeat easily and we won’t. Dart shall help us survive the extinction which no other living species could resist. This is one of humanity’s greatest achievements…