A sidekick is a hero's best friend. It could be a personal videographer.
NASA's asteroid-smashing Direct Asteroid Redirection Test, slated to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos, is currently racing towards its target. It's not the only one. The tiny Italian micro-satellite is behind the doomed DART craft and will transmit real-time footage of the collision to Earthbound scientists.
When DART was launched last year, there was a small Italian craft piggybacking on it. LICIA Cube was deployed from the main craft on Sunday.
We agree if it is giving big-dog-driving-the-motorcycle-with-little-dog-in- the-sidecar-energy. DART will hit the asteroid Didymos. LICIACube will keep an eye on what happens.
"The cubesat will point its cameras towards the asteroid system, but also to DART, and will probably take some pictures of it," said Elena Mazzotta Epifani, an astronomer at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics.
LICIACube will give a lot of information about the collision. The asteroid system has very little known about it, so this little video could reveal some new information.
Epifani told Space.com that they don't know much about Dimorphos, which is too small to have an effect. We assume from theoretical models that Dimorphos is similar to Didymos, but we don't know much about the degree of cohesion of surface materials, the size distribution of the surface debris, and so on.
She said that DART and LICIA will analyze for the first time the physical properties of a near-Earth asteroid, allowing them to investigate its nature and have hints of its formation and evolution.
There are exciting things. We will be watching.
NASA will slam a vehicle into an object. The witness will show us what happened. There is a space.com.
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