Two weeks after launch, NASA’s DART spacecraft, the first planet-defense mission to deflect an asteroid, sent its first images back to Earth.
After strong vibrations during launch and sudden temperature changes up to minus 80 degrees Celsius in space, as well as the fact that the components of the spacecraft’s telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements of only 5 millionths of a meter, even a small movement of something on DART DRACO telescope camera can be very serious.
On December 7, the spacecraft opened the circular door covering the DRACO doorway and transmitted the first image of its surroundings. Taken at a distance of about 3 million kilometers (11 light seconds) from Earth, very close astronomically, the image shows a dozen stars, clear and sharp against the black background of space, not far from where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.
The DART navigation team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the stars in the image to pinpoint exactly how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera was pointing in relation to the spacecraft. With these measurements in hand, the DART team was able to accurately move the spacecraft to aim DRACO at objects of interest such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, which DART captured in another image on December 10th.
The star cluster, located in the constellation Auriga, lies about 4,200 light-years from Earth. Deliberately capturing images with many stars, such as M38, helps the team characterize optical defects in the images as well as calibrate how completely bright the object is – all important details for accurate measurements when DRACO begins capturing images of the destination. The picture shows the spacecraft, the Didymos binary asteroid system, NASA reports.
DRACO (short for Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation) is a high-resolution camera inspired by the NASA New Horizons imaging camera that produced the first close-up images of the Pluto system and the Kuiper belt object, Arrocot. As DART’s only instrument, DRACO will capture images of the asteroid Didymos and its lunar asteroid Dimorphos, as well as support the spacecraft’s autonomous guidance system to steer DART towards its final kinetic impact.
DART is the world’s first planetary defense test mission to intentionally kinetic Dimorphos to slightly alter its movement in space. While none of these asteroids pose a threat to Earth, the DART mission will demonstrate that the spacecraft can autonomously navigate in the direction of the kinetic impact of a relatively small target asteroid, and that it is a viable method of deflecting a truly dangerous asteroid. ever revealed. DART will hit its target on September 26, 2022.
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