Images from the Italian Space Agency instrument are expected to show the DART mission’s impact crater and giant plume of debris.
NASA is set to make history today when it smashes a spacecraft into an asteroid at over 14,700 miles per hour as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission—and the LICIACube satellite will capture it on camera.
Images returned by the Italian-built spacecraft should show impact craters and debris thrown up by the collision.
The DART mission was launched in November 2021. NASA scientists want to find out if it is possible to change an asteroid’s path through space by ramming something into it—a maneuver that has never been tried before.
They think this is one way Earth could be saved if a large asteroid was found to be on a collision path with our planet.
The asteroid that will be targeted by the DART mission is not a threat to Earth, but it is a useful test candidate. The target is a binary asteroid system—a large, 2,560 foot space rock known as Didymos that is orbited by a small, rocky moon called Dimorphos, which is 525 feet in diameter.
