The Double Asteroid Redirection test mission

Abstract

On Feb. 15, 2013, a 20-meter asteroid unexpectedly hit the Earth without any warning near Chelyabinsk, Russia. This impact released about 500 kilotons TNT of energy, injured over 1500 people, and caused extensive property damage. The Chelyabinsk impact served as a dramatic reminder of the asteroid impact hazard and re-emphasized the importance of discovering hazardous Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and learning how to mitigate the threat they pose. Mitigation of a hazardous NEO can be accomplished by deflecting it so that it misses the Earth. Strategies to deflect an asteroid include impacting it with a spacecraft (a kinetic impactor), pulling it with the gravity of the mass of a spacecraft (a gravity tractor), using the blast of a nearby nuclear explosion, and modifying the surface or causing ablation by various means including lasers or particle beams. None of these approaches has been tested on a NEO. The AIDA mission is a proposed international collaboration to demonstrate kinetic deflection, the most mature technique for mitigating the impact hazard of a Near Earth Object (NEO). AIDA consists of two mission elements, the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission and the ESA Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM). The main objectives of the DART mission, which includes the spacecraft kinetic impact and an Earth-based observing campaign, are to: o Perform a full scale demonstration of the spacecraft kinetic impact technique for deflection of an asteroid, by targeting an object large enough to qualify as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid; o Measure the resulting asteroid deflection, by targeting the secondary member of a binary NEO and measuring the period change of the binary orbit; o Understand the hypervelocity collision effects on an asteroid, including the long-term dynamics of impact ejecta; validate models for momentum transfer in asteroid impacts, inferring physical properties of the asteroid surface and sub-surface. The DART target is the secondary member of the binary asteroid 65803 Didymos, with the impact scheduled to occur in September, 2022. The DART impact on the secondary member of the Didymos binary at ∼7 km/s will alter the binary orbit period by at least 4 minutes, assuming a simple transfer of momentum to the target. The period change may be significantly greater, as the momentum transferred to the target asteroid may exceed the incident momentum of the kinetic impactor, possibly by a large factor. The AIM spacecraft will characterize the asteroid target and monitor results of the impact in situ at Didymos, but the period change can be determined accurately solely with ground-based observatories, an approach that is only feasible because of the choice of a binary system as target. AIM is currently in Phase A. DART held its Mission Concept Review on May 21–22, 2015. This paper summarizes the DART mission concept and the path forward in Phase A.