AIDA: Asteroid impact and deflection assessment mission under study at ESA and NASA

Abstract

The Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission will be the first space experiment to demonstrate asteroid impact hazard mitigation by using a kinetic impactor to deflect an asteroid. AIDA is a joint ESA-NASA mission, which includes the ESA Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) rendezvous spacecraft and the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The primary goals of AIDA are (i) to test our ability to impact a small near-Earth asteroid by an hypervelocity projectile and (ii) to measure and characterize the deflection caused by the impact. The AIDA target will be the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos, with the deflection experiment to occur in October, 2022. The DART impact on the secondary member of the binary at ~6 km/s will alter the binary orbit period, which can be measured by Earth-based observatories. The AIM spacecraft will monitor results of the impact in situ at Didymos