In the heart of the Italian night, NASA's Dart probe hit the small asteroid Dimorphos with the aim of deflecting the course of the celestial body which measures 160 meters in diameter. This is the first planetary defense experiment, with the aim of protecting our planet from threatening objects .
The operation was filmed by the probe's camera which sent ever more detailed images to the ground. The impact was greeted with a big round of applause in the NASA control center . The small satellite LiciaCube, which was located less than a thousand kilometers from the asteroid, after the collision entered the scene as a cosmic photojournalist to film everything.
"In the 4 minutes before the impact, LiciaCube started tracking the asteroid 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", he explained Simone Pirrotta, head of the LiciaCube mission for ASI, who followed the mission from the Turin Control Center.
(Unioneonline / ss)