Lancaster company filled vital role in NASA’s DART mission

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NASA’s successful mission in late September to change the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorphos made world headlines.

Unlike in the 2021 film “Don’t look up,” Dimorphos was not a threat to collide with Earth. But DART – an acronym for Double Asteroid Redirection Test – was the first full-scale demonstration of planetary defense technology.

And a Lancaster-based company played a key role in the historic operation.

Advanced Cooling Technologies Inc. developed DART’s thermal management system, working with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Bryan Muzyka, manager of sales and marketing, said ACT had two groups active on the project: a development team of engineers and a technical flight hardware team.

When mission control at Johns Hopkins announced at 7:14 p.m. Sept. 26 that Dimorphos’ path had been affected, as intended, “it was exciting,” he said.

DART spent 10 months flying in space before impacting the asteroid. Prior to the collision, Dimorphos took 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its larger parent asteroid, Didymos, NASA said.

Now Dimorphos circles Didymos in 11 hours and 23 minutes, a trip shortened by 32 minutes.

Astronomers initially were a going to consider the DART mission a success if it cut the trajectory by 10 minutes.

“This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a release. “NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet. This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and all of humanity, demonstrating commitment from NASA’s exceptional team and partners from around the world.”

History with NASA

Advanced Cooling Technologies is almost 20 years old and has a long history of contracts with NASA, Muzyka said. The company started building flight hardware for the space agency around 2007.

Two other recent major NASA contracts are for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – named after NASA’s first chief astronomer – and VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) projects. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory chose ACT to develop and manufacture constant conductance heat pipes and an embedded warm radiator panel that will fly as part of the Coronagraph Instrument on the Nancy Grace Roman telescope.

Constant conductance heat pipes conduct heat without losing energy.

Advanced Cooling Technologies was also the prime thermal management supplier for the electronics heat transport subsystem. The products were to delivered to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this year for an expected launch in October 2026.

The space telescope will investigate the effects of dark energy and dark matter and explore exoplanets, which are planets outside the solar system. For VIPER, ACT designed and fabricated the flight thermal control system.

VIPER, part of the Artemis program, is a golf cart-sized rover that will roam several miles during its approximately 100-day mission across the south pole of the moon to get a close-up of the location and concentration of ice. Launch is expected in late 2024.

ACT is involved as well with the Keystone Space Collaborative, a nonprofit organization focused on serving the booming space economy in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

Muzyka is a board member of the collaborative, which recently hired its first program director and seeks to attract and expand the region’s next generation of space industry business and talent.

Paula Wolf is a freelance writer