NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has caught its first glimpse of the asteroid that it’s aiming to slam into on September 26.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft has caught its first glimpse of the asteroid that it’s set to slam into on September 26.
The image — captured by DART’s Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera in July and released by NASA this week — shows Didymos, the double-asteroid system that includes the spacecraft’s target, Dimorphos , about 20 million miles from DART. NASA said its team wasn’t sure if DRACO would be able to spot the asteroid yet, but after stitching together the numerous images it was able to enhance the final picture and pinpoint Didymos.
“This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques,” Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a release. “The quality of the image is similar to what we could obtain from ground-based telescopes, but it is important to show that DRACO is working properly and can see its target to make any adjustments needed before we begin using the images to guide the spacecraft into the asteroid autonomously.
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