The world's first planetary defence test, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), is scheduled to take place on Monday, and the spacecraft's own 'mini-photographer,' LICIACube (short for Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids), is getting ready to record the occasion. The magnificent photographs of a crescent Earth and the Pleiades star cluster, popularly known as the Seven Sisters, were taken earlier this week by LICIACube as part of the procedure to calibrate the tiny spacecraft and its cameras.

On September 11, the Italian Space Agency (ASI)-contributed LICIACube (pronounced LEE-cha-cube) was released from the DART satellite. With its two optical cameras, LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA, it is planned to record the effects of DART's impact, collecting distinctive photos of the asteroid surface as well as of the debris ejected from the freshly formed crater (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid). By locating and following the target asteroid Dimorphos throughout DART's collision, each camera will gather scientific data to instruct the microsatellite's autonomous system.

The objectives of the CubeSat are to confirm the impact of the spacecraft, track the development of the expelled plume, maybe take pictures of the freshly formed impact crater, and scan the opposite hemisphere of Dimorphos that DART will never view.

The National Institute of Astrophysics, Polytechnic University of Milan, University of Bologna, University of Naples Parthenope, and National Research Council 'Nello Carrara' Institute of Applied Physics are among the scientific teams working on the LICIACube project under the direction of the ASI Robotic Exploration Mission Office, along with industrial contractor Argotec S.r.I.

As a project of the agency's Planetary Missions Program Office, the DART mission is managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. DART, the first planetary defence test mission ever, deliberately impacts Dimorphos in order to gently alter its path through space. The DART mission will show that a spacecraft can travel to a kinetic impact on a relatively tiny asteroid autonomously and that this is a possible method to divert an asteroid from colliding with Earth if one is ever discovered, even though the asteroid poses no threat to Earth. DART will accomplish its goal on September 26, 2022.