NASA successfully crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos on Monday, in a test of the space agencys ability to divert an object from potentially colliding with Earth.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, launched on Nov. 24, 2021, aiming for a binary asteroid system composed of the asteroid Didymos and the smaller “moonlet” asteroid Dimorphos. The spacecrafts mission was to impact Dimorphos and change its orbit around Didymos.
A video and photos shared by NASA show the final moments before impact, recorded by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) imager on board the spacecraft. Researchers will use ground-based telescopes to determine whether the impact successfully changed the asteroids orbit.
NASA says DART is the worlds first demonstration of kinetic planetary defense technology meant to avert a catastrophic impact from an asteroid or comet. The agency says no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance of hitting Earth in the next 100 years, but only about 40 percent of those asteroids have been found so far.
