Falcon 9 Block 5 | Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)
Booster History
- Total Flights
- 32
- Recovery Rate
- 32/32 successful landings
- This Landing
- Landing successful· Drone Ship (ASDS)
- Recovery Site
- Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY)
- Last Flight
- Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink 28 · 181-day turnaround
Mission Details
Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is the first-ever mission to demonstrate the capability to deflect an asteroid by colliding a spacecraft with it at high speed, a technique known as a kinetic impactor. DART is a planetary defense-driven test of one of the technologies for preventing the Earth impact of a hazardous asteroid: the kinetic impactor. DART's primary objective is to demonstrate a kinetic impact on a small asteroid. The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for DART. While Didymos' primary body is approximately 800 meters across, its secondary body has a 150-meter size, which is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose a more common hazard to Earth. The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6 km/s, with the aid of an onboard camera and sophisticated autonomous navigation software. The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, enough to be measured using telescopes on Earth.
- Type
- Robotic Exploration
- Orbit
- Heliocentric N/A (Helio-N/A)
Launch Site
- Pad
- Space Launch Complex 4E
- Location
- Vandenberg SFB, CA, USA
- Country
- 🇺🇸 USA