Nasa DART mission - as it happened: Nasa successfully smashes spacecraft into asteroid in first major test

Engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory announced at 6.14pm EDT that they have detected the asteroid Dimorphos in the Dart spacecraft’s camera for the first time.

Dart, which will slam into Dimophos in one hour, has been locked on to the small asteroids large companion, Didymos.

Within the next 10 minute, Dart will lock on to Dimorphos, and fly autonomously until the moment of impact.

To the naked eye, Dimophos and Didymos still appear as a small white dot on the Nasa feed of the Dart cameras.

Nasa is broadcasting the live feed from its Dart spacecraft’s navigation camera’s online on Nasa’s media channel and Nasa TV, with a new still image downloading around every second.

Clearly visible in the center of the feed is a bright white dot, which is the asteroid Didymos.

Dimorphos, the small asteroid moonlet orbiting Didymos, and Dart’s target, is harder to find.

To find Dimorphos, look at the white dot that is Didymos and then find two o’clock, if Didymos was a clock face. Dimorphos can be seen very close to Didymos at that point on the clock, but is very, very faint compared to the bright Didymos.

“We are mostly looking at light from Didymos,” Northern Arizona University Planetary Scientist Cristina Thomas told reporters at a Monday afternoon press event at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. “Dimorphos is only about 4% of the light from the system.”

The Dart spacecraft has now locked on to its target, the asteroid Dimorphos, according to Nasa.

Dart has been flying autonomously since a little after 3pm. Monday, it’s SmartNav algorithms using the image Didymos, the larger, bright, companion asteroid of Dimorphos, to guide the spacecraft’s flight.

As of a few minutes before 6.30pm EDT, less than an hour from the moment Dart will slam into Dimorphos at 14,400 miles per hour, the spacecraft has its target lock.

The currently small and faint image of Dimorphos will grow rapidly as Dart nears its final destination, and the space rock may grow to fill the entire camera view in the last few moments before the signal is lost, a sign, in this case, of a critical success for the mission.

Dart will strike the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,400 miles per hour, which is pretty fast.

But it’s not that fast, according to Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Dart impact modeling working group lead Angela Stickle.

“We are not going that fast in terms of these hypervelocity space impacts,” she told reporters Monday. “We don’t expect Dart to vaporize.”

The roughly 1,200 pound, golf cart sized Dart, which is flanked by two, school bus sized solar arrays, could make a crater anywhere from four meters to 20 meters wide on Dimorphos, according to Dr Stickle. It really depends on what Dimorphos is made of; the space rock could be anything from a lump of sand to a solid rocky mass.

Learning what an actualy asteroid is made of and how it really responds to a mission like Dart is crucial for modeling the effects of a future Dart-like mission to divert an actually threatening asteroid.

“We can do a lot in a lab on Earth, but there are no materials on Earth that simulate asteroids very well,” Dr Stickle said.

If you’re just tuning in, Nasa is just minutes away from smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid at more than 4 miles per second.

Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or Dart, will smash into the small asteroid Dimorphos at 7.14pm EDT. Launched in November 2021, Dart is designed to test whether a spacecraft can change the orbit of an asteroid, a technique that could one day save Earth from a threatening space rock.

Dimorphos does not now threaten Earth, and will not after geing struck by Dart, which is why Nasa selected the small astertoid for the test.

You can watch the impact on NASA TV.

Dart is now five minutes from impact with the asteroid Dimorphos, which is now clearly visible in the live feed from the spacecraft’s navigation cameras. Dart is 1,100 miles from its terminal destination.

At 7.14pm ET, Nasa made history by slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid, marking the first time life on Earth has altered the course of a heavenly body.

Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, or Dart, slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,400 miles per hour to test whether the impact can alter the asteroid’s orbit. A faint grey smudge in the Dart spacecraft’s camera’s just minutes early, Dimorphos grew to become a huge, greyscale dragon’s egg, studded with boulders, as the spacecraft drew close in the moments before impact.

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Dart impact modeling working group lead Angela Stickle joined reporters immediately following the impact of the Dart spacecraft to cheer for the successful mission and celebrate the the lack of weird surprises.

“It was not a doughnut!” she cried.

Stickle and other engineers had worried early Monday about the possibility that Dimorphos would turn out to be a strange shape that could have allowed Dart to fly through or around the space rock, despite being locked on with its navigation system.

After a successful Dart mission making history by slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid for the first time ever, Nasa and Applied Physics Laboratory officials are holding a post-impact press conference at 8pm EDT available online on Nasa TV.

While it will require later analysis of images of the Dart spacecraft impact to know for sure, Applied Physics Laboratory engineers believe Dart hit within 17 meters of the dead center of the asteroid Dimorphos when the spacecraft struck the space rock at 7.14pm EDT Monday.