The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which is supposed to collide with the asteroid's satellite and change its trajectory, took a picture of Vega, a bright star in the night sky. Thus, a team of specialists checked the operation of the device's camera, Space reports.. com.

It is noted that the device is not quite designed for satellite imagery.. But the mission team wanted to test how much bright light the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) could capture..

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" Vega bright. We take a series of shots and look for light that can scatter off parts of the camera and end up where it shouldn't be.. We use both slow and slow shutter speeds to get different measurements of how diffused light can be,” said Carolyn Ernst, DRACO Specialist..

Vega is only 25 light-years from Earth and is one of the brightest stars in the night sky.. The luminary enters the constellation Lyra and, together with the stars Deneb and Altair, forms the most famous asterism in the Northern Hemisphere, the Summer Triangle..

DRACO took two black and white shots of Vega. The first one, when the camera was pointed directly at the star, turned out to be too saturated to check the scattered light.. " For the second shot, Vega was deliberately placed out of the camera's view to "

These images will be used to calibrate the DRACO prior to the main DART mission..

Recall that the launch of the DART mission took place on November 24, it was carried out using the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.. In September 2022, DART should crash into Dimorph, a satellite of the asteroid Didim. This will be the first demonstration of the agency's strategy to protect the Earth from asteroids..

The device will crash into the satellite of the asteroid to change the trajectory of its movement. The impact is expected to change Dimorph's rotation speed around Didyma by only 1%.. This, in turn, will change the object's orbital period by several minutes, which can be seen with ground-based telescopes..

The collision will be humanity's first attempt to change the dynamics of celestial bodies in the solar system.

The binary system was discovered back in 1996. It consists of two celestial bodies: Didyma with a diameter of about 780 meters, and Dimorph, whose diameter is estimated at 160 meters.. In September 2022, the system will come relatively close to the Earth and will be at a distance of 11 million kilometers from it..