LICIACube Sends Home Images of the DART Impact and the Damage to Dimorphos - by uastronomer
DART’s target, Dimorphos, is a small asteroid with a length of about 160 meters. It orbits a larger companion named Didymos, with a diameter of about 780 meters. The two objects take 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit one another, at a separation of 1.18 kilometers. If theoretical models of the impact are correct, this orbital period should have been shortened by a few minutes. This estimate is only an approximation, however, based on the likely masses of the two objects.
The Didymos and Dimorphos pair occupy an elliptical orbit around the Sun. Its perihelion, or the lowest point in its orbit, is slightly further out from the Sun than Earth, and its highest point, or aphelion, is a little past Mars. This orbit is tilted from the plane of the ecliptic by about 3 degrees, so it never crosses the paths of either Earth or Mars. This means that the Didymos binary asteroid system will never approach Earth, and is not a collision risk.
DART team engineers lift and inspect the LICIACube CubeSat after it arrived at APL in August. The miniaturized satellite will deploy 10 days before DART’s asteroid impact, providing essential footage of the collision and subsequent plume of materials. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman
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