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.
