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On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million miles away.
 
The message prompted the spacecraft to execute a series of pre-programmed commands that caused a small, shoebox-sized satellite contributed by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), called LICIACube, to detach from DART.
 
Fifteen days later, when DART’s journey ended in an intentional head-on collision with near-Earth asteroid Dimorphos, LICIACube flew past the asteroid to snap a series of photos, providing researchers with the only on-site observations of the world’s first demonstration of an asteroid deflection.
 
After analyzing LICIACube’s images, NASA and ASI scientists report on Aug. 21 in the Planetary Science Journal that an estimated 35.3 million pounds (16 million kilograms) of dust and rocks spewed from the asteroid as a result of the crash, refining previous estimates that were based on data from ground and space-based observations.
 
While the debris shed from the asteroid amounted to less than 0.5% of its total mass, it was still 30,000 times greater than the mass of the spacecraft. The impact of the debris on Dimorphos’ trajectory was dramatic: shortly after the collision, the DART team determined that the flying rubble gave Dimorphos a shove several times stronger than the hit from the spacecraft itself.
 
“The plume of material released from the asteroid was like a short burst from a rocket engine,” said Ramin Lolachi, a research scientist who led the study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
 
The important takeaway from the DART mission is that a small, lightweight spacecraft can dramatically alter the path of an asteroid of similar size and composition to Dimorphos, which is a “rubble-pile” asteroid — or a loose, porous collection of rocky material bound together weakly by gravity.
 
“We expect that a lot of near-Earth asteroids have a similar structure to Dimorphos,” said Dave Glenar, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who participated in the study. “So, this extra push from the debris plume is critical to consider when building future spacecraft to deflect asteroids from Earth.”

NASA chose Dimorphos, which poses no threat to Earth, as the mission target due to its relationship with another, larger asteroid named Didymos. Dimorphos orbits Didymos in a binary asteroid system, much like the Moon orbits Earth. Critically, the pair’s position relative to Earth allowed astronomers to measure the duration of the moonlet’s orbit before and after the collision.
 
Ground and space-based observations revealed that DART shortened Dimorphos’ orbit by 33 minutes. But these long-range observations, made from 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) away, were too distant to support a detailed study of the impact debris. That was LICIACube’s job.

After DART’s impact, LICIACube had just 60 seconds to make its most critical observations. Barreling past the asteroid at 15,000 miles (21,140 kilometers) per hour, the spacecraft took a snapshot of the debris roughly once every three seconds. Its closest image was taken just 53 miles (85.3 km) from Dimorphos’ surface.
 
The short distance between LICIACube and Dimorphos provided a unique advantage, allowing the cubesat to capture detailed images of the dusty debris from multiple angles.
 
The research team studied a series of 18 LICIAcube images. The first images in the sequence showed LICIACube’s head-on approach. From this angle, the plume was brightly illuminated by direct sunlight. As the spacecraft glided past the asteroid, its camera pivoted to keep the plume in view.

 As LICIACube looked back at the asteroid, sunlight filtered through the dense cloud of debris, and the plume’s brightness faded. This suggested the plume was made of mostly large particles — about a millimeter or more across — which reflect less light than tiny dust grains.

Since the innermost parts of the plume were so thick with debris that they were completely opaque, the scientists used models to estimate the number of particles that were hidden from view. Data from other rubble-pile asteroids, including pieces of Bennu delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, and laboratory experiments helped refine the estimate.
 
“We estimated that this hidden material accounted for almost 45% of the plume’s total mass,” said Timothy Stubbs, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard who was involved with the study.
 
While DART showed that a high-speed collision with a spacecraft can change an asteroid’s trajectory, Stubbs and his colleagues note that different asteroid types, such as those made of stronger, more tightly packed material, might respond differently to a DART-like impact. “Every time we interact with an asteroid, we find something that surprises us, so there’s a lot more work to do,” said Stubbs. “But DART is a big step forward for planetary defense.”
 
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, managed the DART mission and operated the spacecraft for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office.
 
By Nathan Marder, nathan.marder@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Lee esta nota de prensa en español aquí.

Media accreditation is open for the launch of three observatories that will study the Sun and enhance the ability to make accurate space weather forecasts, helping protect technology systems that affect life on Earth.

NASA is targeting no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23, for the launch of the agency’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) observatory. The observatories will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Accredited media will have the opportunity to participate in prelaunch briefings and interviews with key mission personnel prior to launch, as well as cover the launch. NASA will communicate additional details regarding the media event schedule as the launch date approaches.

Media accreditation deadlines for the launch are as follows:

• International media without U.S. citizenship must apply by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 31.
• U.S. media and U.S. citizens representing international media organizations must apply by 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 4.

All accreditation requests must be submitted online at:

https://media.ksc.nasa.gov

NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. For questions about accreditation, please email: ksc-media-accreditat@mail.nasa.gov. For other mission questions, please contact the NASA Kennedy newsroom at 321-867-2468.

Para obtener información en español en sobre el Centro Espacial Kennedy, comuníquese con Antonia Jaramillo: 321-501-8425. Si desea solicitar entrevistas en español sobre IMAP, póngase en contacto con María-José Viñas: maria-jose.vinasgarcia@nasa.gov. 

NASA’s IMAP will use 10 science instruments to study and map the heliosphere, a vast magnetic bubble surrounding the Sun protecting our solar system from radiation incoming from interstellar space. This mission and its two rideshares will orbit the Sun near Lagrange point 1, about one million miles from Earth, where it will scan the heliosphere, analyze the composition of charged particles, and investigate how those particles move through the solar system. This will provide information on how the Sun accelerates charged particles, filling in essential puzzle pieces to understand the space weather environment across the solar system. The IMAP spacecraft also will continuously monitor solar wind and cosmic radiation. Scientists can use this information to evaluate new and improved capabilities for space weather prediction tools and models, which are vital for the health of human space explorers and the longevity of technological systems, like satellites and power grids, that can affect life on Earth.

The agency’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory is a small satellite set to study the exosphere, the outermost part of Earth’s atmosphere. Using ultraviolet cameras, it will monitor how space weather from the Sun impacts the exosphere, which plays a crucial role in protecting Earth from space weather events that can affect satellites, communications, and power lines. The exosphere, a cloud of neutral hydrogen extending to the Moon and possibly beyond, is created by the breakdown of water and methane by ultraviolet light from the Sun, and its glow, known as the geocorona, has been observed globally only four times before this mission.

The SWFO-L1 mission, managed by NOAA and developed with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and commercial partners, will use a suite of instruments to provide real-time measurements of solar wind, along with a compact coronagraph to detect coronal mass ejections from the Sun. The observatory, serving as an early warning beacon for potentially destructive space weather events, will enable faster and more accurate forecasts. Its 24/7 data will support NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in protecting vital infrastructure, economic interests, and national security, both on Earth and in space.

David McComas, professor, Princeton University, leads the IMAP mission with an international team of 25 partner institutions. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, built the spacecraft and operates the mission. NASA’s IMAP is the fifth mission in NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program portfolio. The Explorers and Heliophysics Project Division at NASA Goddard manages the program for the agency’s Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA Kennedy, manages the launch service for the mission.

For more details about the IMAP mission and updates on launch preparations, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/imap/

-end-

Abbey Interrante
Headquarters, Washington
301-201-0124
abbey.a.interrante@nasa.gov

Sarah Frazier
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
202-853-7191
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov

Leejay Lockhart
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
321-747-8310
leejay.lockhart@nasa.gov

John Jones-Bateman
NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service, Silver Spring, Md.
202-242-0929
john.jones-bateman@noaa.gov