images

DART Mission - Illustration

by

NASA/JHUAPL/Novapix

Reference

e-son36-50002

Date

2021-04-04

Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid. DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space. The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for the DART demonstration. While the Didymos primary body is approximately 780 meters across, its secondary body is about 160-meters in size, which is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth.