Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), made by Italian Space Agency (ASI), is a small 6-unit CubeSat, a secondary spacecraft, that will piggyback with Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and will separate shortly by kicking out of a spring-loaded box situated on (DART) spacecraft at roughly 2.5 miles per hour, 10 days before impact to acquire images of the impact and ejecta as it drifts past the asteroid, 3 days after the impact, after which it dies off.[3][4][5][6] LICIACube will communicate directly with Earth, sending back images of the ejecta after the Dimorphos (Didymos B) flyby.[7]
LICIACube CubeSat a companion satellite of Dart Spacecraft
LICIACube is the first purely Italian spacecraft operating in deep space.
History
LICIACube will be the first deep space mission developed and autonomously managed by an Italian team: the design, integration and test of the CubeSat have been assigned by ASI to the aerospace company Argotec, while the LICIACube Ground Segment has a complex architecture based on the Argotec Mission Control Center, antennas of the NASA Deep Space Network and data archiving and processing, managed at the ASI Space Science Data Center. The scientific team making this cubesat is led by National Institute of Astrophysics INAF (OAR, IAPS, OAA, OAPd, OATs) with the support of IFAC-CNR and University Parthenope of Naples. The LICIACube team includes a wide Italian scientific community, involved in the definition of all the aspects of the mission: trajectory design; mission definition (and real-time orbit determination during operations); impact, plume and imaging simulation and modelling, in preparation of a suitable framework for the analysis and interpretation of in-situ data. The major technological mission challenge, i.e. the autonomous targeting and imaging of such a small body during a fast fly-by, to be accomplished with the limited resources of a CubeSat, is affordable thanks to a strong synergy of all the mentioned teams in support of the engineering tasks.
Sattellite Design
In order to deal with this unique mission, the Argotec platform will use an autonomous navigation system, an integrated propulsion system, a strong camera and an advanced on-board computer.
Scientific Payload
LICIACube is equipped with two optical cameras for conducting asteroidal reconnaissance during flyby, dubbed LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer), a narrow FoV camera and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid), a wide FoV imager with an RGB Bayer pattern filter. These will capture scientific data and inform the microsatellite's autonomous system by finding and tracking the asteroid throughout the encounter.
Goals
It is built with the aim of achieving:
documenting the DART impact’s effects on the secondary member of the (65803) Didymos binary asteroid system,
characterizing the shape of the target, and
performing dedicated scientific investigations on it.
^Kretschmar, Peter; Küppers, Michael (20 December 2018). "The CubeSat Revolution"(PDF). ESA. Retrieved 24 January 2019.
^Adams, Elena; Oshaughnessy, Daniel; Reinhart, Matthew; John, Jeremy; Congdon, Elizabeth; Gallagher, Daniel; Abel, Elisabeth; Atchison, Justin; Fletcher, Zachary; Chen, Michelle; Heistand, Christopher; Huang, Philip; Smith, Evan; Sibol, Deane; Bekker, Dmitriy; Carrelli, David (2019). "Double Asteroid Redirection Test: The Earth Strikes Back". 2019 IEEE Aerospace Conference. pp. 1–11. doi:10.1109/AERO.2019.8742007. ISBN978-1-5386-6854-2. S2CID195222414. In addition, DART is carrying a 6U CubeSat provided by Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI). The CubeSat will provide imagery documentation of the impact, as well as in situ observation of the impact site and resultant ejecta plume
^Fahnestock, E.; Yu, Y.; Cheng, A. F. (2018). "DART Impact Ejecta Simulation and Visualization for Fly-Along CubeSat Operational Planning". AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts. 2018: P51A–07. Bibcode:2018AGUFM.P51A..07F.
