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Mission class · 4 missions

Impactor Mission

A spacecraft (or a released projectile) that deliberately strikes a small body — to excavate subsurface material (Deep Impact) or to deflect it (DART).

Definition

Deliberately striking a target body to excavate material or change its orbit.

Missions of this class

  • Deep ImpactCompleted
    NASA / JPL / University of Maryland

    A NASA Discovery mission that released a 370 kg impactor into the path of comet 9P/Tempel 1 in 2005, excavating material from below the surface while the flyby spacecraft observed the impact — the first look inside a comet.

    Type
    Flyby · impactor
    Launched
    2005-01-12
  • Hayabusa2Extended mission
    JAXA

    JAXA's follow-up to Hayabusa — a far more capable mission to the carbonaceous asteroid Ryugu. It deployed rovers and a lander, fired a projectile to make an artificial crater and sample subsurface material, and returned 5.4 grams of pristine, water- and organic-bearing rock. The spacecraft is now on an extended mission to a small fast-rotating asteroid.

    Type
    Rendezvous · lander · impactor · sample return
    Launched
    2014-12-03
  • DARTCompleted
    NASA / JHU APL

    NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test — the first full-scale planetary-defense demonstration. The spacecraft deliberately crashed into Dimorphos, the small moon of asteroid Didymos, in 2022, measurably shortening its orbit and proving that a kinetic impactor can deflect an asteroid.

    Type
    Impactor (planetary defense)
    Launched
    2021-11-24
  • Don Quijote (concept)Concept / proposed
    ESA (concept study)

    An early-2000s ESA planetary-defense concept — a two-spacecraft study in which an impactor (Hidalgo) would strike an asteroid while an orbiter (Sancho) measured the deflection. It was never built, but it prefigured the AIDA/DART–Hera approach.

    Type
    Impactor + orbiter (concept)

Sources

The primary and reference sources this topic draws on.

  • NASANational Aeronautics and Space Administration

    Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.

    Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.