Ten months after DART’s launch, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) webcast from the mission operations centre outside of Washington, DC, depicted humanity’s first attempt to change the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body.
In the first test of a planetary defence system meant to stop an apocalyptic meteorite collision with Earth, NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a faraway asteroid at supersonic speed on Monday.
The asteroid Dimorphos is about the size of a football stadium. It was 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth when the cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, barely bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, streaked into it at 7:14 pm EDT (2314 GMT).
