Thacher Observatory Followup of NASA’s DART Mission

On September 26, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), and crashed a satellite into the transiting moon Dimorphos of the asteroid Didymos as it was passing by Earth. The goal of this collision was to test our ability to defend Earth from an asteroid impact. From September 15th - November 7th, The Thacher School Observatory collected several nights of data measuring the brightness variations of Didymos, both before and after the DART collision. The aim of our project is to obtain an independent measurement of Dimorphos’s period by producing light curves of Dimorphos’s recurring transits and occultations thereby measuring the efficacy of altering the path of an asteroid by the means of a collision.