On September 27, the DART space probe will crash into the asteroid Dimorph. This will be the first ever experiment to change the trajectory of an asteroid as part of a planetary defense program. Four spacecraft will observe the collision at once: Hubble, James Webb, Lucy, as well as the Italian cubesat LUCIACube. In addition, NASA will broadcast live on YouTube, where viewers will be able to watch the collision from a camera mounted directly on DART.
The broadcast will begin on September 27 at 00:30 Moscow time. Viewers will watch video streamed from the probe's only camera, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation, or DRACO. As NASA notes, a few hours before impact, the screen will be black with a single dot of light. A recording of the moment of impact and the few minutes leading up to it will remain on YouTube.
DART is the world's first mission to test technology to protect the Earth from potentially dangerous asteroids. The test should show whether spacecraft can change the path of asteroids in a way that can be measured with ground-based telescopes. The asteroid Dimorph itself does not currently pose a threat to the Earth. Even if DART fails to change its trajectory, NASA will receive important data for future experiments.
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