Nancy Chabot, Planetary Chief Scientist at APL – Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART): The First Mission to Move an Asteroid

Due to uncontrollable issues, THE CLASSROOM WILL BE CLOSED FOR THIS TALK. This event WILL be live-streamed on YouTube and as a webinar on Zoom. As always, the talk will be posted to the Westport Astronomical Society’s YouTube channel afterwards.

Dr. Chabot first spoke with us in April 2022 and she returns to talk to WAS giving us an update on the wildly successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART mission. 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 will share 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 discuss what that means for potentially applying this technique in the future, if such a need should arise.

Dr. Nancy L. Chabot is the planetary chief scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. Her research focuses on understanding the formation and evolution of rocky planetary bodies in our solar system. She is the Coordination Lead on NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission; the Deputy Principal Investigator for the Mars-moon Exploration with GAmma rays and NEutrons (MEGANE) instrument on the JAXA Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission; and an interdisciplinary scientist on the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission.

The April Cal’s Corner will introduce the Padlock Galaxy.