Nasa dart logo1/12/2024 Plus, explore lessons to bring the science and engineering of the mission into the classroom. Find out more about the historic first test, which could be used to defend our planet if a hazardous asteroid were discovered. A panel of experts from the aerospace and defense industries, government and academia selected the DART mission for the honor, which is named for the club’s founder and past president, Nelson Pete Jackson.įor more information about DART, visit or. The National Space Club and Foundation bridges industry and government to foster excellence in space activity. The first was NASA JPL’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, which earned the award last year.ĪPL manages the DART mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office. It will be the second project sponsored by the PDCO to receive the award. The 2023 Jackson Award will be presented to representatives of the DART team during the annual Goddard Memorial Dinner on March 10. The data returned from DART will inform future planetary defense efforts to guard our planet from a potential calamitous impact.” “I am exceedingly proud of the talented scientists and engineers whose dedicated efforts made humanity’s first planetary defense test mission possible. “This is a well-deserved recognition of a team whose tireless and meticulous preparation resulted in a mission that exceeded all expectations and inspired people across the globe,” said Bobby Braun, head of APL’s Space Exploration Sector. The DART team recently published the first scientific analyses of the impact event. In conjunction with the images returned by DART’s onboard Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), the Italian Space Agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and Lucy spacecraft, the data are helping scientists understand the compositional nature of Dimorphos’ surface, how much material was ejected by the collision, how fast it was ejected, and the distribution of particle sizes in the subsequent dust cloud to ultimately determine how effectively a kinetic impactor spacecraft can modify an asteroid’s orbit. Immediately following DART’s successful collision with its target asteroid, the team began analyzing data from ground-based telescopes and radar facilities worldwide to understand the efficiency of the momentum transfer from DART’s impact. Launched in 2021 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s DART spacecraft traveled for 10 months on its one-way trip to Dimorphos. “But to effectively deflect an asteroid on a collision course with our planet with something like DART we must first find it, which is why accelerating efforts to find asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth continues to be a top priority of NASA’s Planetary Defense efforts.” “DART is an exciting demonstration of one method of asteroid deflection and proved we have technology capable of deflecting an asteroid with a kinetic impactor spacecraft if the need ever arose” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington. DART’s successful collision with Dimorphos changed the asteroid’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, by a whopping 33 minutes. Designed, built and operated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), which oversees the agency’s ongoing efforts in Planetary Defense, DART was humanity’s first mission to intentionally move a celestial object, impacting the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept.
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