Webb telescope being aimed at asteroid targeted by Nasa Dart mission for collision

Nasa’s space telescopes, Webb and its predecessor Hubble, as well as the Lucy space probe, are all set to monitor Nasa’s Dart mission slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid on Monday.

“We are moving an asteroid. We’re changing the motion of a natural body in space. Humanity has never done that before. Kind of astonishing that we’re doing that and what that bodes for the future,” Thomas Statler, a Dart programme scientist, said on Thursday.

Since it began operations earlier this year, Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has captured a series of stunning images of the cosmos.

Last week Nasa revealed JWST’s images of Neptune showing the usually cool planet glowing in infrared light.

Now, images of the Dart mission that will be captured by JWST, and the Hubble space telescope, could shed more light on the physics of the spacecraft’s impact with the asteroid, and also on the asteroid’s debris post-collision.

In the proof-of-concept test, the American space agency’s Dart spacecraft will strike an asteroid called Dimorphos some 68 million miles from Earth, and Nasa will carefully measure the results.

The mission is an attempt by the agency to understand how to deflect or change the trajectory of any future space rocks that could threaten the existence of Earth.

“Dart is demonstrating what we call the kinetic impact technique for changing the speed of the asteroid in space and therefore changing its orbit,” Nasa planetary defence officer Lindley Johnson said. “This demonstration is extremely important to our future here on the earth, and life on earth.”

A small Italian micro-satellite LICIACube, accompanying Dart will also be gathering its own data on the collision.

The “mini-photographer” has warmed up to capture the event.

Last week, LICIACube captured striking images of a crescent Earth and the “Seven Sisters” Pleiades star cluster.

Following Dart’s collision with Dimorphos, the mini-satellite will fly past the asteroid about three times to capture images of the asteroid surface as well as that of the debris ejected from the newly formed crater with its two optical cameras – Luke (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and Leia (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid).

Apart from being a mission to test if asteroids can be deflected off their trajectories, the Dart mission will thus also unravel the “ground truth” about what these space rocks are made of.

Scientists also hope to understand from these studies what approaches, other than deflecting these space rocks from their paths, may work to save us from any Earth-bound asteroids.