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NASA’s trailblazing planetary defense probe, DART, spent the last 306 days calmly cruising through space toward its own gravesite: A Colosseum-size asteroid known as Dimorphos. At around 3 p.m. on Monday, the pepita-shaped rock emerged from the void; just a few pixels of white light on the probe’s camera.
Second by second, the $325 million, 1,200-pound spacecraft inched closer to its final destination. The asteroid grew larger, becoming a pinprick of light, then a rugged sphere. Eventually, it enveloped the screen. At 4:14 p.m. DART’s cameras went red. In mission control, a team member’s voice crackled over the intercom, indicating a loss of signal.
The probe had slammed into the asteroid at around 14,000 miles per hour. Now DART is at rest in its own shallow grave on the surface of Dimorphos. That’s exactly what NASA had hoped for. Cheers and congratulations rang out through the control room at at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
“We’ve worked on this mission for at least seven years now,” said Elena Adams, the DART system engineer at JHUAPL, continuing “to see it so beautifully concluded today was just an incredible feeling — and also, incredibly tiring.”
Unlike the rest of NASA’s deep space fleet of robots, DART was doomed by design. It’s the first test of a planetary defense technology that could one day help protect the Earth from a rogue asteroid or comet by deliberately striking it and sending it off course. DART launched in November 2021 on a carefully planned collision course to an asteroid pair, known as Didymos and Dimorphos.
