Successful kinetic impact into an asteroid for planetary defence

Documento escrito por un elevado número de autores/as, solo se referencia el/la que aparece en primer lugar y los/as autores/as pertenecientes a la UC3M.Although no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalogue of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation1,2. Several approaches have been proposed to potentially prevent an asteroid impact with Earth by deflecting or disrupting an asteroid1,2,3. A test of kinetic impact technology was identified as the highest-priority space mission related to asteroid mitigation1. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is a full-scale test of kinetic impact technology. The mission's target asteroid was Dimorphos, the secondary member of the S-type binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. This binary asteroid system was chosen to enable ground-based telescopes to quantify the asteroid deflection caused by the impact of the DART spacecraft4. Although past missions have utilized impactors to investigate the properties of small bodies5,6, those earlier missions were not intended to deflect their targets and did not achieve measurable deflections. Here we report the DART spacecraft's autonomous kinetic impact into Dimorphos and reconstruct the impact event, including the timeline leading to impact, the location and nature of the DART impact site, and the size and shape of Dimorphos. The successful impact of the DART spacecraft with Dimorphos and the resulting change in the orbit of Dimorphos7 demonstrates that kinetic impactor technology is a viable technique to potentially defend Earth if necessary.This work was supported by the DART mission, NASA Contract No. 80MSFC20D0004. This work was supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) within the LICIACube project (ASI-INAF agreement AC n. 2019-31-HH.0). P.S. and P.P. were supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, grant 20-04431S. B.J.B. was funded by the NASA DART Participating Scientist Program #20-DARTPSP20-0007. S.C. acknowledges funding from the Crosby Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. G.S.C. was funded by UK Science and Technology Facilities Council Grant ST/S000615/1. F.F. acknowledges funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Ambizione grant No. 193346. M.J. and S.D.R. acknowledge support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (project number 200021_207359), and from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 870377 (project NEO-MAPP). T.K. is supported by Academy of Finland project 335595 and by institutional support RVO 67985831 of the Institute of Geology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. P.M. acknowledges funding support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 870377 (project NEO-MAPP), the CNRS through the MITI interdisciplinary programmes, CNES and ESA. N.M. and C.Q.R. acknowledge funding support from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 870377 (NEO-MAPP project) and support from the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). J.O. has been funded by grant No. PID2021-125883NB-C22 by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation/State Agency of Research MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ‘ERDF A way of making Europe’. S.R.S. acknowledges support from the NASA DART Participating Scientist Program, award no. 80NSSC22K0318. J.K.S. acknowledges support from NASA award 80NSSC21K1014. J.M.T.-R. acknowledges financial support from the project PID2021-128062NB-I00 funded by Spanish MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. P.B. acknowledges funding support from Europlanet/University of Edinburgh and Technical University of Kenya. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration