from there, it lifted off to begin DART's journey to the Didymos system and it propelled the spacecraft into space. Launch The DART spacecraft was launched on 24 November 2021, at 06:21:02 UTC. Early planning suggested that DART was to be deployed into a high-altitude, high-eccentricity Earth orbit designed to avoid the Moon. In such a scenario, DART would use its low-thrust, high-efficiency NEXT ion engine to slowly escape from its high Earth orbit to a slightly inclined near-Earth solar orbit, from which it would maneuver onto a collision trajectory with its target. But because DART was launched as a dedicated Falcon 9 mission, the payload along with Falcon 9's second stage was placed directly on an Earth escape trajectory and into heliocentric orbit when the second stage reignited for a second engine startup or escape burn. Thus, although DART carries a first-of-its-kind electric thruster and plenty of xenon fuel, Falcon 9 did almost all of the work, leaving the spacecraft to perform only a few trajectory-correction burns with simple chemical thrusters as it homed in on Didymos's moon Dimorphos. Transit The transit phase before impact lasted about 9 months. During its interplanetary travel, the DART spacecraft made a distant flyby of the 578-meter-diameter near-Earth asteroid in March 2022. DART passed from in its closest approach on 2 March 2022. DART's DRACO camera opened its aperture door and took its first light image of some stars on 7 December 2021, when it was away from Earth. The stars in DRACO's first light image were used as calibration for the camera's pointing before it could be used to image other targets. On 10 December 2021, DRACO imaged the open cluster Messier 38 for further optical and photometric calibration. On 27 May 2022, DART observed the bright star Vega with DRACO to test the camera's optics with scattered light. On 1 July and 2 August 2022, DART's DRACO imager observed Jupiter and its moon Europa emerging from behind the planet, as a performance test for the SMART Nav tracking system to prepare for the Dimorphos impact. Course of the impact Two months before the impact, on 27 July 2022, the DRACO camera detected the Didymos system from approximately away and started refining its trajectory. The LICIACube nanosatellite was released on 11 September 2022, 15 days before the impact. Four hours before impact, some away, DART began to operate in complete autonomy under