INFLUENCE OF THE BODY COMPOSITION ON THE EVOLUTION OF EJECTA IN THE DIDYMOS-DIMORPHOS BINARY SYSTEM

The DART spacecraft will impact Dimorphos (the secondary body of the Didymos binary asteroid) to test the kinetic impactor deflection method against possibly hazardous Near Earth Asteroids. The impact crater will be first imaged by the LICIACube spacecraft [1], hosted as a piggyback and released by DART just before the impact, and then, several years later, by the HERA probe. To fully exploit the wealth of data obtained and to understand the physics of the whole impact experiment it is of paramount importance to properly model the dynamics of the binary system pre- and post-impact and the dynamics of the particles ejected from the impact crater. In this context a comprehensive model was developed to simulate the outcome of the impact experiment. The final goal is to study the short (within the DART-LICIACube framework) and medium (the HERA framework) term dynamics of the system and of the ejecta particles with a comprehensive model described in the following section. The expected final output shall be useful to better understand the initial crater evolution and the characterization of the dust environment within the binary system at the time of HERA arrival, exploring also the possibility of the formation of long term stable particles.