How citizens scientists observed the DART impact and contributed to planetary defence

Unistellar citizen scientists observed the NASA mission’s impact into asteroid moon Dimorphos, the results published in a scientific paper.

By Iain Todd

Published: Thursday, 06 July 2023 at 12:00 am

When NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission launched on 24 November 2021, its mission was simple, but spectacular:

To travel to the the Didymos system – an asteroid orbited by moon Dimorphos – and smash into the latter.

The mission’s goal was to see whether a human-made spacecraft would be able to significantly deflect an asteroid that happened to be on a collision course with planet Earth.

DART arrived at the system on 26 September 2022 and made its successful impact into Dimorphos’s surface.

Professional telescopes around the world – and, indeed the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes – captured the impact, providing important data to mission scientists as to whether or not the DART mission had been a success.

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The impact of NASA’s DART mission into asteroid moonlet Dimorphus, as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (left) and the Hubble Space Telescope (right). Credit: Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

But a team of citizen scientists were also observing DART’s impact, using a network of telescopes made by Unistellar.

The company makes ‘smart’ telescopes that can automatically locate and track celestial objects and display them on a computer screen, rather than through an eyepiece.

Using Unistellar’s eVscopes, observers in Kenya and Réunion Island were able to observe the DART impact.

The team of citizen scientists, which included 8 astronomers from the SETI Institute and which was led by SETI Institute postdoctoral fellow Ariel Graykowski, published the results in the journal Nature in March 2023.