NASA’s DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is a carefully planned experiment that will help determine if kinetic impactor technology—hurtling a spacecraft, toward a rocky body at speeds of about 13,000 miles per hour with the intention of pushing it off course—can serve as a reliable method of asteroid deflection in the event that such a hazard ever heads for the Earth. The recently installed Roll-Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) are critical technology that will enable the DART spacecraft to navigate through space and effectively reach the Didymos asteroid system. The flexible and rollable “wings” are lighter and more compact than traditional solar arrays despite their size; in space, each array will slowly unfurl to reach 28 feet in length, about the size of a bus. The technology was first demonstrated on the International Space Station in 2017 and again this past June, but DART will be the first spacecraft to fly the new arrays, paving the way for their use on future missions. Deployable Space Systems (DSS), the manufacturing company out of Goleta, California, which developed the technology, delivered ROSA to APL in May and worked closely with the APL team in the following weeks to install them onto the spacecraft.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Lee Hobson
2019-06-05
<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://dart.jhuapl.edu/Gallery/media/videos/Behind_the_Scenes_Inspecting_DART_s_Roll_Out_Solar_Array_ROSA_Technology.mp4">https://dart.jhuapl.edu/Gallery/media/videos/Behind_the_Scenes_Inspecting_DART_s_Roll_Out_Solar_Array_ROSA_Technology.mp4</a>