VADER: Probing the Dark Side of Dimorphos with LICIACube LUKE

VADER: Probing the Dark Side of Dimorphos with LICIACube LUKE

Blog Article

The ASI cubesat LICIACube has been part of the first planetary defense mission DART, having among its scopes to complement the DRACO images to better constrain the Dimorphos shape.LICIACube had two different cameras, LEIA and LUKE, and to accomplish its goal, it exploited the unique possibility of acquiring images of the Dimorphos hemisphere not seen by DART from a vantage point of view, in Revisiting the Hermeneutic Project of the Fragment in its Exigency for a Digital Paradigm of Publication both time and space.This work is indeed aimed at constraining the tridimensional shape of Dimorphos, starting from both LUKE images of the nonimpacted hemisphere of Dimorphos and the results obtained by DART looking at the impacted hemisphere.

To this aim, we developed a semiautomatic Computer Vision algorithm, named VADER, able to identify objects of interest on the basis of physical characteristics, subsequently used as input to retrieve the shape of the ellipse An approach to cooking process scheduling for a family restaurant projected in the LUKE images analyzed.Thanks to this shape, we then extracted information about the Dimorphos ellipsoid by applying a series of quantitative geometric considerations.Although the solution space coming from this analysis includes the triaxial ellipsoid found by using DART images, we cannot discard the possibility that Dimorphos has a more elongated shape, more similar to what is expected from previous theories and observations.

The result of our work seems therefore to emphasize the unique value of the LICIACube mission and its images, making even clearer the need of having different points of view to accurately define the shape of an asteroid.