NASA’s DART spacecraft has an unusual mission — to crash into an asteroid, in order to test whether this would be an effective planetary defense concept if an asteroid were to threaten Earth. NASA/Johns Hopkins APLThe images were captured using the DRACO camera (standing for Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation), a high-resolution camera that is the only instrument on board the DART craft. Although it isn’t its primary purpose, DRACO can and will be used to send images back to Earth as well. These two recently released images show that the camera is working as expected, and should be able to send back more images as the mission progresses. DART is currently on its way through the solar system as is scheduled to impact asteroid Didymos on September 26, 2022.

Source: The Nation December 28, 2021 01:07 UTC