Direct NASA probe for the redirect test asteroid The asteroid (DART) will fly to the moon of asteroid Demorphos on September 27 in an attempt to change its orbit around its parent body, the asteroid Didymos, and the broadcast will show images from DART’s DRACO instrument, the only instrument spacecraft science. –
“The DRACO images will be absolutely stunning,” said Nancy Chabot, head of DART coordination at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Research Laboratory, during a press conference.
“You will come upon an asteroid that no one has ever seen before,” said Chabot. “You will see things tens of centimeters large for the final image and then they will be cropped … I think it will be okay to be large.”
The images will return to Earth at the rate of one image per second, and we will see them in real time on NASA TV, and officials expect the actual display to occur about two minutes before the collision, when the asteroid begins to fill the view. of the camera.
“We are really excited to see what it looks like,” said Michelle Chen, chief engineer of the DART algorithm known as SMART Nav.
Also, as the Earth will be approximately seven million miles (11 million kilometers) from the pair of asteroids upon impact, the engineers cannot manually steer DART, instead SMART Nav will autonomously steer the spacecraft to the asteroid and will have all systems ready for the serious accident. .
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