Last month, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) moved into the final design and assembly phase.

The DART mission will send a spacecraft to crash into the secondary body of the binary asteroid 65803 Didymos in order to demonstrate the kinetic impact technique needed to change the path of a near-Earth asteroid.

This is a crucial step on the path to knowing mission parameters for any future impact missions. We here at B612 are fully supportive of this step and are looking forward to tracking DART’s progress and its scheduled launch in 2021.  ESA’s planned Hera Mission will arrive about three years later, to characterize Didymoon in great detail. In particular, it will perform detailed measurements of the physical properties of the body, as well as its orbit, to characterize the consequences of DART’s kinetic impact.

You can read more about the DART mission in this Universe Today article or learn more about the recent milestone in this John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab press release.