Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART): The First Mission to Move an Asteroid

On September 26, 2022, NASA’s DART mission successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos and made history as the first test of asteroid deflection.

As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos, which poses no threat to Earth, demonstrated a mitigation technique for potentially protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid in the future, if one were discovered.

Following DART’s impact with Dimorphos, the DART Investigation Team, composed of scientists from around the world, worked to observe the results of DART’s impact with telescopic facilities, to analyze the returned spacecraft images, and to model the impact event, resulting ejecta, and asteroid dynamics.

This presentation shares DART’s successful autonomous navigation to impact a small asteroid at high speed and the results that followed from DART’s impact event, as well as discussing what that means for potentially applying this technique in the future, if such a need should arise.

Dr. Nancy L. Chabot is the Chief Scientist of the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD, USA. She was the Coordination Lead on NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission and an Instrument Scientist on NASA’s MESSENGER mission. She is currently involved in JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission and the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission.

She is an author on more than 100 scientific publications. She has been a member of five field teams with the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program, is a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society, and asteroid 6899 Nancychabot is named in her honor.

She has served as Chair of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group, as Panel Chair for the 2023–2032 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey, and as President of the Meteoritical Society.

Dr. Chabot earned an undergraduate degree in physics at Rice University and a PhD in planetary science at the University of Arizona.