The American Aeronautics and Space Administration’s DART mission (NASA) is called crash success asteroid Dimorphos Tuesday (27/9).
The DART mission is the first mission in human history to attempt to deflect a space object into outer space.
Although the spacecraft successfully hit the targeted asteroid Dimorphos, the DART mission isn’t over. This collision is a fresh start for further research to be carried out by researchers.
ANNOUNCEMENT
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To investigate the impact of the collision, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera mission will be launched in 2024. So the spacecraft together with two CubeSats are expected to arrive at the asteroid Dimorphos two years later.
Hera will study both asteroids, from measuring the physical properties of Dimorphos, to examining the craters caused by DART, to examining their orbits. Subsequently, the results of this research will be used to build an effective planetary defense strategy.
Reported by CNN, one of the CubeSats of the Italian Space Agency will fly to Dimorphos to take photos and videos of the impact of the asteroid and maybe even see the crater it may have left. The mini-satellite will also see Dimorphos’ opposite hemisphere from Earth.
The CubeSat will also rotate to point its camera at the Dimorphos as it flies. With this camera, we can see the impact of the collision on the asteroid.
The Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids or LICIACube will not be the only observer of Dimorphos. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Hubble Space Telescope, and NASA’s Lucy mission will also observe the impact of the DART mission.
Furthermore, the binary asteroid Didymos-Dimorphos appears as a tiny point of light in the center of the star-studded sky when viewed from Earth. The point periodically brightens and dims as the 160-meter-wide lunar asteroid moves around the larger 780-meter-wide Didymos, creating an eclipse-like phenomenon.
As mentioned Space, it is from this frequency of decreasing luminosity that astronomers were able to accurately determine Dimorphos’s orbital period (11 hours and 55 minutes). Then from the decrease in brightness caused by the asteroid fragment, the researchers were able to calculate how much Dimorphos’s orbit changed after the DART impact.
Researchers expect the asteroid to be pushed closer to Didymos, accelerating its orbital period by several minutes.
(lom / lesimo)
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