At 1:14 a.m. on Tuesday, the DART spacecraft will impact the asteroid Dimorphos.

NASA is broadcasting live what will be the first rehearsal of a planetary defense mission.

The operation will take place 11 million kilometers away and its objective is to slightly change the orbit of this rock of about 160 meters in diameter, which orbits another larger asteroid called Didymos.


A small satellite of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) called LICIA will take images of the impact.

With observations from ground-based telescopes, NASA will determine to what extent this test mission has been successful and has managed to modify the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorphos.

Likewise, what happens this morning will be studied in depth in December 2026, when another space mission called HERA arrives in this asteroid system, which is being built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and whose launch is scheduled for October 2024. .

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DART, the first practices of humanity to learn to deflect an asteroid: "A rock like Dimorphos could devastate Spain"

  • Writing: TERESA GUERREROMadrid

  • Writing: JAVIER AGUIRRE(Infographics)

DART, the first practices of humanity to learn to deflect an asteroid: "A rock like Dimorphos could devastate Spain"


As Michael Kueppers, an ESA scientist, explains to EL MUNDO, "Didymos is an "S" class asteroid, which are rocky asteroids, mainly made of silicates. They correspond to meteorites called "ordinary chondrites" in English. We do not know the composition of Dimorphos The most accepted theories of the formation of binary asteroids predict that the composition of Didymos and Dimorphos must be the same.

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