After capturing images of Vega, one of the brightest stars in Earth’s night sky, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test’s (DART) camera recently focused on another stunning spectacle: Jupiter and its four largest moons. NASA’s DART spacecraft is currently cruising toward its highly-anticipated Sept
After capturing images of Vega, one of the brightest stars in Earth’s night sky, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test’s camera recently focused on another stunning spectacle:’s DART spacecraft is currently cruising toward its highly-anticipated September 26 encounter with the binary asteroid Didymos. Meanwhile, during the journey, the spacecraft’s imager — the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation, or DRACO — has snapped thousands of pictures of stars.
DRACO is the only instrument on DART. As such, not only will it capture images of Didymos and Dimorphos, but it will also support the Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation . This is the spacecraft’s autonomous guidance system, which will guide DART to impact., the mission operations team pointed the DRACO imager to Jupiter on July 1 and August 2. The team used it to detect and target Jupiter’s moon Europa as it emerged from behind Jupiter.
The test provided valuable experience for the SMART Nav team, including knowledge of how the SMART Nav team views data from the spacecraft. “Every time we do one of these tests, we tweak the displays, make them a little bit better and a little bit more responsive to what we will actually be looking for during the real terminal event,” said Peter Ericksen SMART Nav software engineer at APL.
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