In late November 2021, NASA's DART mission launched a spacecraft to deliberately collide with an asteroid, testing orbital deflection techniques. The compact LICIACube satellite detached 10 days prior to document the event.
Space agencies worldwide are exploring innovative strategies to protect Earth from potential asteroid impacts. One promising approach involves altering the trajectory of threatening objects. To test its feasibility, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) on November 24, 2021, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The target is the Didymos binary asteroid system: a 780-meter-diameter primary asteroid, Didymos, orbited by its 160-meter moon, Dimorphos (often called Didymoon). The DART impactor reached the site in fall 2022 after traveling over seven million kilometers. Its sole purpose: a high-speed crash into the smaller moon.
Mission scientists expect the impact to speed up the moon's orbit by tens of seconds. Researchers will measure this orbital change via the system's reflectance, while LICIACube—a CubeSat developed by the Italian Space Agency—will capture on-site imagery and data. It detaches about 10 days before impact, records the event, and relays findings to the control center in Turin, Italy.
LICIACube is far smaller than its DART host—roughly the size of a handbag, compared to a school bus.
Positioned at an optimal distance—not too close to avoid debris, but near enough for clear views—it carries two cameras: LUKE and LEIA (a nod to Star Wars). LEIA provides high-resolution black-and-white images of the impact plume and surface details, while LUKE offers a wide-field view to track the plume's full extent, enhanced by RGB filters for analyzing the moon's composition.
DART itself features the DRACO camera for final navigation four hours pre-impact. Data streams to Earth in near real-time (about 38-second delay), though DRACO is destroyed on collision. LICIACube stores observations and transmits for weeks post-impact, with an expected operational life of six months.
