On Tuesday, September 27, the Italian space agency released the first pictures from the tiny Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) spacecraft. These pictures came to Earth about three hours after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully hit the asteroid Dimorphos, nearly 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth.
A before-and-after picture of the Didymos asteroid system and shots of bright debris around Dimorphos were taken with both of LICIACube’s cameras.
Elisabetta Dotto, in charge of the science team at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), said at a news conference held in Italian on Tuesday, “We’re very proud.”
Dotto said these pictures are essential for helping scientists figure out how Dimorphos is put together and what it is made of. She said these are just the first couple of LICIACube photos to be shown but that the rest of the pictures that will be displayed over the next few days are also good.
In the last picture of the day, Dimorphos is surrounded by bright, hazy particles. Dotto said, “This cloud of dust and debris that was made by the impact has completely covered Dimorphos.” Before the collision, scientists didn’t know how the asteroid would react to it.
NASA’s DART mission crashed into Dimorphos, a smaller space rock orbiting a giant asteroid called Didymos. This was done to test a possible way to change the orbit of a dangerous asteroid if scientists ever find one. Now, astronomers are keeping a close eye on the Didymos system, ready to measure how much Dimorphos’ orbit has sped up.
That’s the information NASA needs to figure out how well DART worked, but there’s no reason to stop there. Mission staff also used three spacecraft and many ground-based observatories to watch the impact and what happened afterward.
Then there’s LICIACube, of course. The tiny spacecraft rode on DART, which sent it into space on September 11. LICIACube then used Earth and the Pleiades star cluster as targets to test its two cameras.
The LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid (LEIA) camera has a higher resolution but can only take black-and-white pictures. On the other hand, the LICIACube Unit Key Explorer (LUKE) has red-green-blue color filters and a wider field of view.
On Monday, the small observer was ready to go. It stayed back at a safe distance as DART sped toward the impact site, and then about three minutes later, it flew past the spot and took pictures as it went. LICIACube also took photos of the other side of Dimorphos, across from where DART crashed.
Now, LICIACube is on its own as Italy’s first deep-space mission. It slowly sends images back to Earth as it travels through deep space.
