Successful Kinetic Impact into an Asteroid for Planetary Defense

Abstract

While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalog of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation. Several approaches have been proposed to potentially prevent an asteroid impact with Earth by deflecting or disrupting an asteroid. A test of kinetic impact technology was identified as the highest priority space mission related to asteroid mitigation. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is the first full-scale test of kinetic impact technology. The mission's target asteroid was Dimorphos, the secondary member of the S-type binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. This binary asteroid system was chosen to enable ground-based telescopes to quantify the asteroid deflection caused by DART's impact. While past missions have utilized impactors to investigate the properties of small bodies those earlier missions were not intended to deflect their targets and did not achieve measurable deflections. Here we report the DART spacecraft's autonomous kinetic impact into Dimorphos and reconstruct the impact event, including the timeline leading to impact, the location and nature of the DART impact site, and the size and shape of Dimorphos. The successful impact of the DART spacecraft with Dimorphos and the resulting change in Dimorphos's orbit demonstrates that kinetic impactor technology is a viable technique to potentially defend Earth if necessary.

Accepted by Nature

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Cited by in corpus (36)

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• Ejecta from the DART-produced active asteroid Dimorphos
• Physical properties of asteroid Dimorphos as derived from the DART impact
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• The Dimorphos Boulder Swarm
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• Direct $N$-body simulations of satellite formation around small asteroids: insights from DART's encounter with the Didymos system
• The Dynamical State of the Didymos System Before and After the DART Impact
• Dimorphos orbit determination from mutual events photometry
• Lessons learned from NASA's DART impact about disrupting rubble-pile asteroids
• The Yarkovsky effect on the long-term evolution of binary asteroids
• Rapid formation of binary asteroid systems post rotational failure: a recipe for making atypically shaped satellites
• Lifted particles from the fast spinning primary of the Near-Earth Asteroid (65803) Didymos
• High-Speed Boulders and the Debris Field in DART Ejecta
• Survivability of Amorphous Ice in Comets Depends on the Latent Heat of Crystallization of Impure Water Ice
• Delivery of DART Impact Ejecta to Mars and Earth: Opportunity for Meteor Observations
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• A Simulation Platform for Small Solar System Bodies' Gravity Using the Einstein-Elevator