Masatoshi (Toshi) Hirabayashi, an associate professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, has been selected by NASA’s Hera Participating Scientist Program (HERA-PSP) to join the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera mission. Together, with an international consortium of 11 other scientists, Hirabayashi will perform a multi-faceted, detailed, post-impact study of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The DART mission was led by the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
The DART mission targeted the binary asteroid system where Dimorphos (the smaller secondary) orbits Didymos (the larger primary), to intentionally cause a spacecraft crash on Dimorphos. The collision, which occurred on September 26, 2022, was the first to demonstrate asteroid deflection by changing the asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact. Astronomers monitored this event using ground- and space-based telescopes like the Hubble Telescope (HST). A recent Nature article, “Ejecta, From the DART-Produced Active Asteroid Dimorphos,” on which Hirabayashi is a co-author, documented HST’s detailed observations of the intense dust ejection generated by the impact.
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