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The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is NASA’s first dedicated planetary defense mission. Launched in November last year this month from Vandenberg Space Force Base, DART will demonstrate active asteroid deflection by altering the mutual orbit of the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos through a kinetic impact. This impact will happen on September 26, 2022 at 6:14 pm CT. Ejecta, rocks and gravel expelled at high velocity from the impact crater, will most likely be created during the collision of the spacecraft with its target. The aim of the DART experiment is to enable the scientific community to better understand the role that such ejecta play in altering an asteroid’s orbit. After a brief overview of the DART mission, we will watch the last moments of DART before the spacecraft impacts its target streamed live on NASA-TV.
Join the Department of Aerospace Engineering as we watch this momentous occasion together. Concessions will be available while supplies last.
Students enrolled in AE590 may receive credit for attending the mission overview at 5:00pm. Please register now and swipe in at the beginning of the event.
About the speaker: Siegfried Eggl is a member of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Scientific Investigation Team. His role with the DART mission is to better understand how rocks and gravel that are produced during the collision of the DART spacecraft with its target affect the orbit of the entire Didymos system. In particular, he, along with a partner, were tasked with making sure that DART would not cause any unintended changes in the Didymos system's orbit around the Sun. Combining advanced techniques in astrodynamics and uncertainty propagation Siegfried and his partner were able to rule out a collision of Didymos with the Earth in the foreseeable future as a consequence of DART. To this end they developed a new way of modeling how ejecta escaping the system influence the heliocentric orbit of the binary asteroid pair. They also made predictions on how the change in Didymos' orbit around the Sun could be measured with a combination of ground based telescopes and the European Space Agency's follow on mission, Hera, which will arrive at Didymos in 2027.