Behind the Spacecraft: Michelle Chen

NASA’s #DARTmission will purposely crash a spacecraft into an asteroid to change its orbital period. But in order to hit the mark, this test mission needs to locate its target first. That’s why Johns Hopkins APL engineer Michelle Chen helped develop new autonomous navigation techniques that will ensure a bullseye. Follow DART: The DART mission is a test of a technique that could be used to mitigate the threat of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth should one be discovered in the future. DART’s target is not a threat to Earth. While no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years, only about 40 percent of those asteroids have been found as of October 2021.