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DENVER – SpaceX will launch a NASA mission to test an asteroid deflection technique at a price significantly lower than the company's past agency contracts.
NASA announced on April 11 that it had awarded SpaceX the contract to launch the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) on a Falcon 9 in June 2021 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The total cost for the mission for NASA, including launch and related services, is $ 69 million.
DART is a mission under development at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as part of NASA's Global Defense Program. The spacecraft will use an electric propulsion system to get to the asteroid Didymos. DART will collide with a small moon orbiting Didymos, sometimes dubbed Didymoon, at a speech of six kilometers per second
Astronomers will measure the evolution of the moon's orbit around Didymos as a result of the impact to measure the transfer of energy from the impact on the moon. This will help scientists evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed kinetic impact approach as a means of deflecting an asteroid in a collision with the Earth.
DART originally planned to launch as a carpool the commercial launch of a geostationary orbit satellite. The mission was spent several months ago at a dedicated launch. NASA has not revealed whether DART, which weighs around 500kg, will share the launcher with another spacecraft.
The $ 61 million introductory price is significantly lower than NASA's contracts for the launch of Falcon 9. NASA awarded SpaceX a contract for the Sentinel-6A satellite in October 2017 for launch in November 2020, of a Falcon 9 Vandenberg for a total cost of $ 97 million. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite will be launched on a Falcon 9 in April 2021 as part of a contract awarded in November 2016 worth $ 112 million.
"SpaceX is proud to continue its successful partnership with NASA to support this important interplanetary mission," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a company news release. "This award underscores NASA's confidence in Falcon 9's ability to perform critical science missions while delivering the industry's best launch value."
The awarding of the DART contract to SpaceX comes a week after the company dropped its protest against another NASA launch contract awarded earlier this year to United Launch Alliance for the Lucy mission. When the protest was filed in February, SpaceX claimed it could launch the mission at a much lower cost than Ulas 5.
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