The small asteroid Dimorphos wrapped in a cloud of debris, from which, like rays, trails of dust made luminous by the illumination of the Sun depart: this is what can be seen in one of the first spectacular images, of the 620 taken by the Italian mini-satellite
LiciaCube
, immediately after the impact of NASA's Dart probe
on
the
small
asteroid, which occurred during the night.
The images taken by
LiciaCube
, a satellite managed and coordinated by the Italian Space Agency (
ASI
) and created by the
Argotec
company of Turin, were presented in the press conference organized at
Argotec
and are the very first to arrive on Earth.
"The Dart
mission
of NASA and our satellite
LiciaCube
was a great success and we thank
NASA
for having wanted us as a partner", commented the president of
ASI
,
Giorgio Saccoccia
.
This is "a golden moment for Italian space activities and the results can be seen, in terms of scientific results, of international dialogue, first of all with NASA and ESA".
During the press conference, the scientist
Elisabetta Dotto
, leader of the scientific team of the National Institute of Astrophysics (
Inaf
), underlines that it is "the first time that a binary system of asteroids has been observed on site, we will have many other images and we will conduct many analyzes. The work that awaits us now will be surprising and already promises to be a great success, this mission is a technological and scientific challenge and we thank all the partners ”.
A "huge success" is also the comment of
Thomas Zurbruchen
, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate of NASA, who spoke at the opening of the press conference: "We woke up this morning with enormous success, and enormous success was also of LiciaCube ", the Italian satellite that worked in NASA's Dart mission, the first planetary defense mission and which saw the Dart probe collide with the asteroid Dimorphos.