LICIACube: THE LIGHT ITALIAN CUBESAT FOR IMAGING OF ASTEROIDS IN SUPPORT TO THE NASA MISSION DART

LICIACube, the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids [1,2] is an ASI cubesat that witnessed the impact of DART [3] on Dimorphos, the moonlet of the binary asteroid Didymos. LICIACube was launched with DART on November 2021 and travelled for 9.5 months, as a piggyback. Fifteen days before the DART impact, LICIACube was deployed and started its approaching phase towards the target, performing several communications session with the DSN antennas, that allowed to download satellite telemetries and data and to upload commands for the spacecraft. In the terminal phase of the closest approach, no guidance was possible from the Earth, thus the last pointing was automatically decided and executed by the Artificial Intelligence on board of the small satellite. During this phase, also stars and planets observations were performed for calibration