Mission accomplished for the Dart mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), of NASA, which in the night between 26 and 27 September last launched, destroying itself, towards the small asteroid Dimorphos, diverting its trajectory.
The success was immortalized by the Italian minisatellite LiciaCube, managed and coordinated by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and created by the Argotec company, with two timelapse videos that testify what happened immediately before and after the impact.
The impact of the Dart probe on the Dimorphos asteroid imaged by the LiciaCube satellite (source: ASI / NASA)
"Dart has altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos and the confirmation came from the telescopes," said the chief administrator of NASA, Bill Nelson, in the press conference organized by the American space agency and in which he made the announcement with the president of ASI, Giorgio Saccoccia.
"I think our planet can feel safer for the future", Saccoccia noted, showing the two videos, the result of the composition of the images captured by LiciaCube in the last seconds before impact and in the approximately 30 seconds immediately following.
It was a very violent impact, which threw a cloud of dust and debris into the air, so intense and persistent that it gave the asteroid Dimorphos the appearance of a comet, observed Lori Glaze.
The asteroid Dimorphos after the impact, imaged in LiciaCube (source: ASI / NASA)
Thus marks a new success, the small Italian satellite LiciaCube (Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids), created with the scientific contribution of the National Institute of Astrophysics (Inaf), Politecnico di Milano, University of Bologna, Parthenope University of Naples and the Institute of Applied Physics 'Nello Carrara' of the National Research Council (Cnr-Ifac).
The first satellite built in our country to undertake a journey into deep space, at a distance of 1 kilometers from Earth, LiciaCube has identified the asteroid with a size of 160 meters at a relative speed of 6.6 kilometers per second.
The two videos, which form a fundamental basis for analyzing what happened during the impact and for knowing the nature of the asteroid, were obtained using some of the 627 images that it has captured and of which have so far reached Earth 326. When all they will be available to those responsible for the mission and researchers and will also be able to say a lot about the hidden side of the asteroid.