NASA DART mission: A preliminary mathematical dynamical model and its nonlinear circuit emulation

Abstract

Abstract On September 22, 2022, a spacecraft, designed by the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) team, successfully attempted to deflect the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos, which together with Didymos, constitutes a binary system of near-Earth asteroids orbiting around the Sun. The effect of the impact of the spacecraft was to shorten the orbit of Dimorphos of about 33 min with respect to the original one. In this communication, a simple nonlinear circuit emulator based on a mathematical model allowing the emulation of the DART mission behavior is presented. The modeling is approached referring to the Kepler problem that leads to a highly nonlinear dynamical model. The problem is approached numerically, by using appropriate integration algorithms for both the two-body and three-body formulations of the problem, and experimentally, by means of an analog/digital electronic circuit emulator of the system that allows us to realize faster and qualitative more efficient experiments.