NASA’s Asteroid-Smashing DART Spacecraft Snaps First Look at Its Target – By Amanda Kooser (CNET) / Sept 10, 2022
Soundtrack suggestion: Crash Into Me by the Dave Matthews Band.
The moonlet Dimorphos is strolling through space with its larger asteroid companion Didymos, minding its own business, blissfully unaware of what’s coming. Meanwhile, NASA’s DART spacecraft is eying Dimorphos like a crouched cat preparing to pounce.
On Wednesday, NASA released DART’s first view of its target, a long-distance look at the Didymos system. DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Mission. The spacecraft will fling itself into Dimorphos to try to change its orbit around Didymos. All this effort is in the name of planetary defense and figuring out if hulk-smashing a dangerous asteroid could nudge it away from impacting Earth some day in the future.
The image shows the asteroid system as a tiny dot of light against the backdrop of space. The composite is made up of 243 images snapped by DART’s onboard Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) on July 27 from a distance of 20 million miles (32 million kilometers) away.
