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NASA wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to capture its historic ambush of an unassuming asteroid with its most powerful space observatories.
On Thursday, NASA and the European Space Agency released new images taken by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes of the moment the DART spacecraft impacted the small asteroid Dimorphos.
DART was designed as humanity’s first experiment in kinetic impact mitigation, which is a lot of syllables to say the goal was to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if the collision could alter the space rock’s orbit. The technique could one day be used to protect Earth from an asteroid or comet that threatens to impact our planet.
