NASA's DART mission: What to know about the impact - Fox News

There are just two days until the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) deliberately crashes into a faraway asteroid. .

The small moonlet orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, lapping it around every 11 hours and 55 minutes.

Illustration of NASA’s DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system. .

The DART spacecraft will slam into the 2,500-foot asteroid at 14,000 miles per hour and cameras and telescopes will watch the crash – though it will take days or weeks to figure out if it actually changed the orbit.

DART has a single instrument, the DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical) navigation imager.

DART was approximately 16 million miles (26 million km) from Earth when the image was taken, with Jupiter approximately 435 million miles (700 million km) away from the spacecraft.

NASA SPACECRAFT TO SMASH INTO ASTEROID TO TEST PLANETARY DEFENSE

Managers are confident DART won’t smash into the larger Didymos by mistake because the spacecraft’s navigation is designed to distinguish between the two asteroids and target the smaller one

This image of the light from asteroid Didymos and its orbiting moonlet Dimorphos is a composite of 243 images taken by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) on July 27, 2022. 

(Credits: NASA JPL DART Navigation Team)