LiciaCUBE on the NASA DART mission captured images of the first impact of a spacecraft on an asteroid.
Argotec’s Mission Control Center recorded LICIACube performing an asteroid fly-by at 7 km per second, or more than 15,1046 km per hour, under fully autonomous navigation.
LICIACube, built by Argotec and deployed from NASA’s DART spacecraft, returned 627 pictures of DART’s collision with Dimorphos.
Argotec’s LICIACube is a six-unit CubeSat developed for the Italian Space Agency that participated in NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in late September 2022.
LICIACube, provided by the Italian Space Agency, deployed from DART 15 days before impact to capture images of the collision and resulting ejecta cloud.
An Italian cubesat called LICIACube, deployed from DART in the weeks before impact, flew by Dimorphos minutes after the impact and took 720 images showing ejecta-plume details not visible from Earth.
The Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) provided by the Italian Space Agency deployed from DART 15 days before impact to capture images of the impact and the resulting ejecta cloud.
DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission that launched in November 2021, will deliberately impact the moonlet Dimorphos and carries LICIACube provided by the Italian Space Agency as a companion CubeSat.