Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Tuesday, March 25, Lecture starts at 3:00 PM
On line and in the Building 8 Management Conference Center (MCC)

Andy Cheng

"DART Mission Challenges"

ABSTRACT -- The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was the first planetary defense test mission, demonstrating kinetic impactor technology by deliberately colliding with an asteroid in order to change its orbit. DART impacted Dimorphos, the small 150 meter moon of the binary asteroid system [65803] Didymos. Guidance, navigation, and control challenges were critically important to DART to enable hitting a target as small as Dimorphos. The smallest object previously targeted for a spacecraft impact, comet 9P/Tempel 1 targeted by Deep Impact, is more than 40 times larger in diameter than Dimorphos. The precise targeting needed to hit such a small body required both optical navigation during the final month of the approach and a spacecraft real-time autonomous navigation system, SMARTNav, to guide DART to impact onto Dimorphos. SMARTNav first detected Dimorphos 73 minutes before impact and commenced targeting Dimorphos 50 minutes before impact. DART impacted Dimorphos within 25 m of the center-of-figure. The DART mission demonstrated that the kinetic impactor technique is a viable means to defend the Earth from the threat of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, should one be discovered in the future.

SPEAKER -- A. F. Cheng was co-lead with A. S. Rivkin of the DART mission Investigation Team and originally conceived the concept of demonstrating a kinetic impact on the moon of the Didymos system. He was formerly Chief Scientist of the Johns Hopkins UUniversity's Applied Physics Lab's Space Department from 2008-2021, and he also was Deputy Chief Scientist for Space Science in NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA HQ from 2007 to 2008. He was an Interdisciplinary Scientist on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and he was Project Scientist on the NEAR mission to asteroid Eros. He was PI for the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. He received an AB in physics from Princeton University in 1971 and a PhD in physics from Columbia University in 1977.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov