Hurling through the solar system at hypersonic speeds, NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into a distant asteroid in a test of the world's first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth.
A cube-shaped impactor vehicle roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays slammed into asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, and self-destructed at 11 a.m. Monday through Tuesday night CET, about XNUMX million kilometers from Earth.
Everything was broadcast live on the NASA website from the mission's operations center outside Washington.
The $330 million mission, some seven years in development, is designed to determine whether the spacecraft is capable of altering an asteroid's trajectory through sheer kinetic force, pushing it off course just enough to keep Earth out of harm's way.
Whether the experiment succeeded after making its intended impact will not be known until further telescope observations of the asteroid next month. But NASA officials welcomed the immediate outcome of the test early this morning, saying the spacecraft had achieved its purpose.
"NASA works for the benefit of humanity, so for us it's the ultimate fulfillment of our mission to do something like this - a demonstration of technology that, who knows, could one day save our home," said Pam Melroy of the NASA administration.
DART was launched on a SpaceX rocket in November 2021.
DART's target was an asteroid about 170 meters in diameter that orbits five times its parent asteroid Didymos as part of a binary pair with the same name, the Greek word for twin.
Neither object poses a real threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test could not have created a new threat by mistake.
Dimorphos and Didymos are small compared to the cataclysmic asteroid Chicxulub that slammed into Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world's plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.
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