Guide to follow the impact of the DART probe against the Dimorphic asteroid

If all goes as expected, the DART probe will crash into the small asteroid Dimorph today.

Although the final preparations will take hours, the show itself will be very fast.

It can be followed almost live in EL PAÍS (around one in the morning, Spanish time, six in the afternoon in Mexico City), with little more than half a minute of delay due to the distance.

In the year that it has been flying, the DART probe has followed a relatively conventional trajectory.

He has executed several course corrections taking as references some bright star that he could distinguish with his camera, the same one that will allow him to see the approach and impact with the asteroid.

He was even able to photograph Jupiter and its four main satellites, just as Europa was emerging from behind the planet, as a rehearsal for locating little Dimorph in its orbit around Didymus.

The situation will change about four hours before the impact, when the photos of Dídimo —not of his little companion— allow his position to be known with an error of the order of a kilometer.

From then on, ground control will offload all navigation tasks to the probe, which will have to locate its target by itself.

Around 23:30 on Monday, Spanish peninsular time, the first images should begin to be received.

Most of the screen will be black, with just a bright dot in the center: Didimo.

Dimorphic, much smaller, won't even be seen yet.

The final phase of the impact will begin around midnight.

Both asteroids should be visible on the screen, although they are so small that the detail will not be very spectacular.

For just over half an hour, its discs will grow as the vehicle approaches.

Diagram of the DART mission during its impact with Didymus.NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

Five minutes before 1:00 a.m., DART will enter the fine-tuning phase.

His sensors will completely ignore Didymus's presence and focus on heading towards Dimorphs.

The main guiding instrument is its camera, whose objective is a 20-centimeter aperture telescope, derived from the one used a few years ago on the

probe , which transmitted photos of Pluto.

This one is much more advanced;

not in vain ten years have passed since then.

The images it sends back will measure about 2,500 pixels on a side, an excellent resolution that should make it possible to distinguish details as small as 20 centimeters just before impact.

The only onboard thruster will be running throughout this phase.

It's an ion engine that emits a jet of xenon ions and produces a very low boost, but (unlike chemical engines) it's been running for months.

The large solar panels of the DART serve precisely to feed electricity to this propellant.

At 1:11 a.m., Spanish peninsular time, the probe will turn off the engine.

It will be moving at more than 23,000 kilometers per hour, already on a collision course, if the television camera has been able to identify the small disk of Dimorphs.

In such a case, the images you send in these last few seconds promise to be spectacular.

After that, the screen will only show noise.

A couple of weeks ago, the DART probe launched a small Italian sub-satellite, equipped with another television camera.

It follows its same path, only a few hundred kilometers behind, so it will fly over the impact site three minutes later.

Being a small and underpowered ship, it will take a few more hours to send your images and the reconstruction process will take longer.

Probably, in the middle of the week we can see the result of that first cosmic bombardment.

You can follow