When the NASA’s DART space NASA spacecraft is launched on November 24 in what is the world’s first mission to redirect an asteroid, ESA’s ESTRACK network will play a key role: finding, tracking and staying in contact with the mission as it leaves Earth toward its 170 meter target a ‘moon’ asteroid called Dimorphos.
Approximately a length of one and a half contiguous football fields, Dimorphos is currently almost 500 million kilometers away, orbiting the Sun in a path that brings it close to Earth’s orbit and beyond Mars’. It is part of a double asteroid system, gravitationally bound to the Didymos asteroid which is almost five times larger.
