ve again in mid-2020 for approximately eight months. In fact, it'll be even brighter than it was earlier this year and our team is looking forward to repeating the process again.
Beyond DART, our observations will help us better understand near-Earth asteroid binary systems. About 15% of near-Earth asteroids are thought to be binary systems, so they're a small, but notable amount of the population. The shape of Didymos A and the orbit of Didymoon have already contributed to our understanding of the formation of these systems and our future observations will help us understand their current evolution.
It's been a while since I first imagined sending a spacecraft to Didymos. A decade ago, I was in a mission design summer school at NASA Ames Research Center as a graduate student with a dozen other students with a wide range of scientific interests. Of that small group, four of us are now actively involved in DART and it has been really exciting to see how far we've all come. I know we're all excited for DART's impact in 2022!