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NASA leaders say Earthlings now have a way to fight back if an asteroid is headed here after successfully changing the orbit of an asteroid by slamming an appliance-size spacecraft into the space rock.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft launched from California last fall and zoomed through space to reach a binary asteroid system — the larger Didymos and its smaller moonlet Dimorphos, about 7 million miles from Earth.
Two weeks after the impact, teams with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) and NASA provided an update on what they’ve learned from DART’s smash.
On Sept. 26, DART used autonomous navigation to hone in on Dimorphos, then charge head first at about 15,000 mph, acting as a battering ram into the space rock. The goal was to test one potential plan to protect Earth from asteroids known as the kinetic impactor theory. If the mission was a success, DART would change Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos but only by a few seconds.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called the first planetary defense test a “bullseye,” confirming DART’s impact changed the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos by 32 minutes.
The moonlet asteroid previously took almost 12 hours to orbit the larger Didymos.
