At 1.14 Italian time, NASA's Dart probe hit the asteroid Dimorphos in live video to divert its trajectory as part of a planetary defense experiment.
The test was carried out to assess the system's ability to defend the Earth from potentially threatening asteroids in the event of an impact in the atmosphere.
"The vending machine-sized spacecraft successfully collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, which is the size of a football stadium and poses no threat to Earth."
"We are entering a new era, an era in which we potentially have the ability to protect ourselves from something like the impact of a dangerous asteroid," comments Lori Glaze, director of NASA's division of planetary sciences.
As the Dart probe approached its target, which in the course of an hour of live broadcast transformed from a white dot approaching a well-identified boulder, its camera sent ever more detailed images of the irregular and rough surface to the ground. of the small celestial body, 13 million kilometers away from the earth.
Thanks to a particular Italian sub satellite, Licia Cube, which made it possible to follow the progressive approach of the celestial body, with a diameter of 160 meters.
Managed and coordinated by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and built by the Argotec company, it was located less than a thousand kilometers from the asteroid and immediately before the collision entered the scene as a cosmic photojournalist to capture the point of impact.
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Dart
It was "a spectacular impact!", Simone Pirrotta, head of the Licia Cube mission for ASI, who followed the mission from the control center in Turin, told Ansa, "in the 4 minutes before the impact, Licia Cube started the asteroid tracking guided no longer by the pre-loaded trajectories on board, but by the imaging system, the steering and attitude control system based on real-time images ", Pirrotta underlined.