![]() But despite the fact that the DART spacecraft has been smashed to smithereens, researchers’ work is far from complete. The mission can now be crowned a success. “As new data come in each day, astronomers will be able to better assess whether, and how, a mission like DART could be used in the future to help protect Earth from a collision with an asteroid if we ever discover one headed our way,” said NASA planetary science division director Lori Glaze in a press release. It’s a watershed moment in the field of planetary defense, which aims to understand and ideally mitigate the risks posed to Earth from asteroids and comets that may cross our planet’s path. That’s roughly 26 times the mission’s 73-second baseline for success. ![]() After following the pair for two weeks, NASA announced yesterday that Dimorphos’ 11-hour and 55-minute orbit has since shrunk to 11 hours and 23 minutes, a difference of 32 minutes. DART’s goal was to adjust the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos, aiming to alter its nearly 12-hour period by at least 73 seconds. The target, Dimorphos, is the 525-foot-wide (160 meters) moonlet orbiting a larger asteroid, 65803 Didymos, which is 0.5 mile (780 m) across. The hit was intentional, the culmination of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) designed to determine whether a “kinetic impact” - i.e., hitting an asteroid with a spacecraft - could change its trajectory. In late September, a 1,260-pound (570 kilograms) spacecraft traveling 14,000 mph (22,530 km/h) smacked directly into a small asteroid named Dimorphos, throwing up a massive cloud of dusty debris. ![]()
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