A front row seat.
Guardians of the GalaxyCase in point: NASA's asteroid-smashing
, slated to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, is currently racing towards its target. But it's not alone!trailing behind the doomed DART craft is a tiny Italian micro-satellite, which, equipped with two optical cameras, will transmit real-time footage of the collision for Earthbound scientists.The small Italian craft, dubbed the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids, or LICIACube, piggybacked its way into space when DART was launched late last year.
"We do not know almost anything about Dimorphos, which is too small to produce an effect disentangled from the one coming from the main body," Epifani told. "We presume from theoretical models on formation of binary asteroids that Dimorphos is very similar to Didymos, but we know virtually nothing about the degree of cohesion of surface materials, the size distribution of the surface debris, and so on.
"Together, DART and LICIACube will analyze for the first time and with high detail the physical properties of a binary near-Earth asteroid," she continued, "allowing us to investigate its nature and have hints on its formation and evolution."
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NASA probe ready to slam into an asteroid this month in landmark planetary defense testOn Sept. 26, DART will slam headfirst into a small asteroid. You know, for science.
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NASA sets date to crash spacecraft in an attempt to deflect asteroidThe small asteroid is a half-mile wide, is likely full of boulders and has an elliptical orbit around the solar system
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