Iliana Maifeld-Carucci

NASA’s DART mission

  1. Space Vehicle
  2. Article
    1. NASA
    2. “NASA’s DART mission will deliberately crash into an asteroid’s moon in the name of planetary defense”
    3. CNN
    4. https://us.cnn.com/2021/10/05/world/nasa-dart-asteroid-mission-launch-date-scn/index.html
    5. Summary
      1. NASA’s DART mission which aims to purposefully crash into an astroid will launch on Nov. 23rd
      2. This will be a test of using spacecraft to deflect astroids from negatively impacting Earth.
      3. In this instance, the DART mission will be targeting the moon Dimorphos which orbits the astroid Didymos.
      4. To do this DART will deploy a small CubeSat that will film DART hitting Dimorphos using a small camera and autonomous navigation softwrae. This impact is designed to alter Dimorphos’ speed by 1%, changing the moon’s orbit. The ESA’s Hera mission will follow up 3 years after the impact to study the effects of the planned crash.
  3. Cybersecurity Implications: The biggest potential threat to this mission is probably that threat actors such as nation states, terrorist groups, or ideological actors would infect the ground or communication infrastructure to get to control the DART spacecraft to crash into something else or crash into the astroid moon differently than planned. However, I think this sort of mission would be of less interest to threat actors than others since the space craft is planning to crash and therefore has less long-term advantage gained from attacking it.
  4. In the above case, the critical systems would likely be impacted.