The plan is for DART to fly directly into Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph), bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track closer to its larger companion asteroid.Ĭameras on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART days in advance are designed to record the collision and send images back to Earth.ĭART's own camera began returning pictures at the rate of one image per second during its final approach, with those images streaming live on NASA TV starting more than an hour before impact.
The mission represents a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft must ultimately crash to succeed. It marks the world's first attempt to change the motion of an asteroid, or any celestial body.ĭART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, has made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA's flight directors, with control to be handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey. The mission's finale will test the ability of a spacecraft to alter an asteroid's trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into the object at high speed to nudge it astray just enough to keep our planet out of harm's way. EDT (2300 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
The cube-shaped "impactor" vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos, about as large as a football stadium, and self-destruct at around 7 p.m.
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