Four new studies confirm that NASA’s DART mission, which crashed a rocket into the asteroid Dimorphos, changed the asteroid’s trajectory and could potentially save Earth one day, given enough time to prepare.
Roughly five months after intentionally crashing a rocket into a distant asteroid, NASA has some good news: The mission was a smashing success, and similar methods could prevent Earth from being obliterated by planet-killing space rocks in the future, according to four new studies published in the journal Nature.
“I cheered when DART slammed head on into the asteroid for the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration, and that was just the start,” Nicola Fox (opens in new tab), associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement (opens in new tab). “These findings add to our fundamental understanding of asteroids and build a foundation for how humanity can defend Earth from a potentially hazardous asteroid by altering its course.”
NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in late November 2021, after five years of planning. The goal was to test a theory of planetary defense called the “kinetic impactor” technique — basically, altering an asteroid’s trajectory by crashing a rocket into it at high speed.
In September 2022, NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, a 525-foot-wide (160 meters) “moonlet” that orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, roughly 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth.
