Just two weeks after launch, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has returned its first images from space.
On December 10, 2021, DART’s DRACO camera captured and returned this image of Messier 38. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact.
Its target is the binary, near-Earth asteroid system Didymos, composed of the roughly 780-m- (2,560-foot) diameter Didymos and the smaller, approximately 160-m- (530-foot) size moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits Didymos. DART will impact Dimorphos to change its orbit within the binary system.
DART launched November 24, 2021, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the United States.
After the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees Celsius in space, members of the DART team held their breath in anticipation.
Because components of the spacecraft’s telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious.
On December 7, 2021, after opening the circular door to its telescopic imager, DART captured this image of about a dozen stars near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
On December 7, DART popped open the circular door covering the aperture of its Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) and, to everyone’s glee, streamed back the first image of its surrounding environment.
Taken about 3.2 million km (2 million miles) from Earth — very close, astronomically speaking — the image shows about a dozen stars, crystal-clear and sharp against the black backdrop of space, near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.
The DART team used the stars in the image to determine precisely how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointed relative to the spacecraft.
With those measurements in hand, the team could accurately move the spacecraft to point DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38, also known as the Starfish Cluster, that DART captured in another image on December 10.
Located in the constellation Auriga, Messier 38 lies some 3,480 light-years from Earth.
Intentionally capturing images with many stars like Messier 38 helps the researchers characterize optical imperfections in the images as well as calibrate how absolutely bright an object is — all important details for accurate measurements when DRACO starts imaging the spacecraft’s destination.
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This article is based on text provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
