LICIACube: a Deep Space CubSat to Witness the First Asteroid Kinetic Impactor Test

Since the last few years several international space agencies are focusing their attention on small spacecraft technologies and capabilities for missions in science, exploration, and space operations. Moreover, the Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) that could impact the Earth in the near future received increased interest. In this contest the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission has been developed by NASA for Planetary Defence program. The DART mission is a spacecraft acting as a kinetic impactor that will change the orbit of an asteroid, by crashing itself on Dimorphos, the moonlet of the Didymos binary system, modifying its revolution period around the primary body. In order to increase the accuracy of the impact effect of the deflection measurement, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) 6U Cubesat named LICIACube (Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids), manufactured by the Italian aerospace company Argotec, has been designed to be carried as piggyback by the DART spacecraft. The LICIACube team includes a wide Italian scientific community, involved in the definition of all the aspects of the mission: trajectory design, mission definition and real-time orbit determination during operations, scientific simulation and modelling. The DART/LICIACube mission, launched on 24th November 2021, is presently on its way to Didymos and the arrival is foreseen on 26 September 2022. Fifteen days before the impact, LICIACube will be released and it will perform braking manoeuvres in order to increase the relative velocity with respect to the DART spacecraft and will prepare for an autonomous flyby with Dimorphos. During the scientific phase LICIACube will pursue the following mission objectives: i) testify the DART impact, ii) characterize the impact ejecta plume, its structure and evolution, iii) characterize the impact site (and possibly size and morphology of the crater) on Dimorphos' surface, and iv) image the non-impact hemisphere, thus increasing the accuracy of the shape determination. LICIACube is equipped with two imaging cameras: LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid), a narrow camera equipped with a Panchromatic filter, and LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) a wide-angle camera, which is the Gecko imager from SCS space, with RGB Bayer pattern filter. The images obtained by LICIACube will been downloaded directly to Earth thanks to the antennas of the NASA Deep Space Network and LICIACube Ground Segment, composed by the Argotec Mission Control Centre and the ASI Space Science Data Center for archiving and processing data. The LICIACube mission is a challenging opportunity for the implementation of a deep space mission, based on a small scale but highly technological platform.