New York: After 10 months in space, NASA’s Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — the world’s first demonstration of planetary defense technology — successfully impacted its asteroid target, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid into space.
Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT on Monday.
“At its core, DART represents an unprecedented success for planetary defense, but it is also a mission of unity with real benefits for all of humanity,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
“As NASA studies space and our home planet, we are also working to protect this home, and this international collaboration has turned science fiction into science fact, demonstrating one way to protect Earth,” Nelson added.
As part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrated a viable mitigation technique to protect the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet.
DART was headed for asteroid Dimorphos, a small body just 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter. It orbits a larger 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos. None of the asteroids pose a threat to Earth.
The mission’s one-way trip confirmed that NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.
The investigation team will now observe Dimorphos using ground-based telescopes to confirm that the DART impact changed the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos.
Researchers expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%, or roughly 10 minutes; accurately measuring how much the asteroid was deflected is one of the main goals of the full-scale test.