Small satellites are nowadays extremely powerful, flexible and sustainable platforms that can complement the missions usually assigned to larger spacecrafts. Modularity, standardization, intensive use of state-of-the art Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies consent to prepare cheaper missions in shorter timeframes, thus allowing a more frequent access to space environment, including Cislunar and Interplanetary. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) promotes, funds and coordinates the national initiatives also in this promising sector, both for national missions and within international cooperation. ArgoMoon and LICIACube, both cubesats 6U in size, are the initial results of this endeavor. The Italian firm Argotec, designed, manufactured and tested them for ASI, making them the first Italian spacecraft to function beyond the Low Earth Orbit. The Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) participated in the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the first active Planetary Defense mission. On September 26th, 2022, LICIACube took unique pictures of the impact effects on asteroid Dimorphos after DART's collision, such as the plume of ejecta and the secondary asteroid's nonvisible side. On November 16th, 2022, NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) injected ArgoMoon (AGM) into cislunar orbit during the "Artemis-1 mission" to test small satellite technologies in this environment. During both missions, the Mission Control Centre established in Italy employed NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas as terminal elements for communicating with the cubesats. The national team, led by Argotec and coordinated by the Agency and investigation leaders coordinated by the National Institute of Astrophysics INAF, has conducted the operations. Accurate target tracking was necessary for both missions, which was managed by Argotec's on-board software. The Polytechnic of Milan designed the nominal trajectory and corrective maneuvers for LICIACube's guidance. The University of Bologna and JPL had specialized teams who independently accomplished navigation using radiometric observables, which were compared and adopted. This paper describes the initial outcomes of the two ASI missions, with particular attention to the primary common and specific challenges and the first assessment of activities carried out.

On 2022 September 26, the DART spacecraft will impact the surface of Dimorphos, the ∼160 m size satellite of the binary near-Earth asteroid (NEA) (65803) Didymos. What will be observed on the surfaces of both asteroids and at the DART impact site is largely unknown, beyond the details of Didymos revealed by previous Arecibo and Goldstone radar observations. We present here the expected DART and LICIACube observations of the Didymos system and discuss the planned mapping strategies. By searching similar geological features and processes identified on other NEAs, we constrain the impact conditions that DART might encounter at Dimorphos, assessing both the asteroid’s surface and interior structure.

The smallest member of the Didymos binary near-Earth object system (Dimorphos) is the target of the DART/LICIACube mission, the first attempt to change the orbit of another celestial body via a kinetic impactor. It is important to characterize the unperturbed system prior to the DART impact. In this work we obtained, for the first time, spectral characterization of the system at several rotational phases from TNG+DOLORES in the visible range (0.34–0.81 μ m). This is crucial in order to disentangle the primary and secondary bodies and highlight eventual dishomogeneities on their surfaces. We confirm that a subtle but persistent spectral variability appears, even when compared with data obtained from previous 2003 and 2019 apparitions. While the reason for such variability is still under investigation, our analysis hints that different compositions could play a role. Future observations during the brighter 2022 apparition in synergy with data obtained from LUKE on board LICIACube will definitely tackle this conundrum.

LICIACube - the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids" is managed by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and will be part of the NASA DART mission, with the aim of i) documenting the DART impact's effects on the secondary member of the (65803) Didymos binary asteroid system, ii) characterizing the shape of the target, and iii) performing dedicated scientific investigations on it. DART probe will be launched at the end of 2021 and LICIACube will be hosted as piggyback during the interplanetary cruise, then released 10 days before the impact, and autonomously guided along its fly-by trajectory. The LICIACube payload is composed by LEIA, a narrow FoV camera, and LUKE, a wide FoV imager with an RGB Bayer pattern filter, that will collect and transmit to Earth several unique images of the effects of the DART impact on the asteroid, such as the formation and the development of the plume potentially determined by the impact. LICIACube will be the first deep space mission developed and autonomously managed by an Italian team: the design, integration and test of the CubeSat have been assigned by ASI to the aerospace company Argotec, while the LICIACube Ground Segment has a complex architecture based on the Argotec Mission Control Center, antennas of the NASA Deep Space Network and data archiving and processing, managed at the ASI Space Science Data Center. 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); impact, plume and imaging simulation and modelling, in preparation of a suitable framework for the analysis and interpretation of in-situ data. The major technological mission challenge, i.e. the autonomous targeting and imaging of such a small body during a fast fly-by, to be accomplished with the limited resources of a CubeSat, is affordable thanks to a strong synergy of all the mentioned teams in support of the engineering tasks.