“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.

“ LICIACube –用于对小行星成像的意大利轻型立方体”由意大利航天局（ASI）管理，将成为NASA DART任务的一部分，目的是：i）记录DART对（ 65803）Didymos双星小行星系统；ii）表征目标形状；iii）对它进行专门的科学调查。DART探测器将于2021年底发射升空，LICIACube将在行星际巡航中作为背back式宿主，然后在撞击发生前10天释放，并沿着其飞行轨迹自动进行引导。LICIACube有效载荷由狭窄的FoV相机LEIA和具有RGB Bayer图案滤镜的宽FoV成像仪LUKE组成，它将收集DART对小行星撞击的独特图像，并将其传输到地球，例如羽流的形成和发展可能由影响决定。

LICIACube将是由意大利团队开发和自主管理的首个深空任务：ASI已将CubeSat的设计，集成和测试分配给了航天公司Argotec，而LICIACube地面部分则具有基于Argotec的复杂体系结构任务控制中心，NASA深空网络的天线以及数据归档和处理，由ASI太空科学数据中心进行管理。LICIACube团队包括广泛的意大利科学界，参与了任务各个方面的定义：轨迹设计；任务定义（以及运行期间的实时轨道确定）；冲击，羽流和成像模拟和建模，以准备用于分析和解释原位数据的合适框架。主要的技术任务挑战，即