Long-term monitoring of Didymos with the LCOGT Network and MRO after the DART impact

Lister, Tim, Constantinescu, Cora, Ryan, William, Ryan, Eileen, Gomez, Edward ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5749-1507, Phillips, Liz, Rożek, Agata, Usher, Helen, Murphy, Brian P., Chatelain, Joseph and Greenstreet, Sarah 2024. Long-term monitoring of Didymos with the LCOGT Network and MRO after the DART impact. The Planetary Science Journal 5 (5) , 127. 10.3847/psj/ad4345

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Abstract

The world’s first planetary defense test mission was carried out in late 2022 by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The main DART spacecraft, which was accompanied by the ASI-provided LICIACube cubesat, intentionally impacted Dimorphos, the smaller secondary of the near-Earth object binary system (65803) Didymos, on 2022 September 26. The impact released a large amount of ejecta, which, combined with the spacecraft’s momentum, produced the observed 33 ± 1 minute period change that was subsequently observed from ground-based telescopes. The DART mission, in addition to having successfully changed the orbital period of Dimorphos, also activated the asteroid as a result of the impact but under known conditions, unlike other impacts on asteroids. We have conducted long-term monitoring over 5 months following the impact with the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network and Magdalena Ridge Observatory (MRO). This was supplemented by almost 3 months of more sparsely sampled data, primarily from educational users of the LCOGT network during the period from 2022 July 5 to 2022 September 25, prior to the impact date of 2022 September 26. Here we report the observations of the Didymos system and DART impact ejecta with the telescopes of the LCOGT network from T+1.93 days to T+151.3 days after impact, and we study the evolving morphology of the ejecta cloud and evolving tail over the entire length of the data set. In addition, we combined these intensive data sets with the earlier sparse observations over the ∼90 days prior to impact to derive a new disk-integrated phase function model using the H, G 1, G 2 parameterization.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Type: cc-by
Publisher:	IOP Publishing
ISSN:	2632-3338
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 June 2024
Date of Acceptance:	11 April 2024
Last Modified:	03 Jun 2024 10:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/169387

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