The impact occurred at 7:15 p.m. ET greeted by cheers from the mission team in Laurel, Maryland. The DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, launched 10 months ago.
A NASA spacecraft has intentionally slammed into an asteroid in humanity's first test of planetary defense.
The goal of the spacecraft, in addition to impact, is to affect the motion of an asteroid in space, but it will take time for scientists to determine if the asteroid's orbit changed. "For the first time ever, we will measurably change the orbit of a celestial body in the universe," said Robert Braun, head of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory's Space Exploration Sector in Laurel, Maryland.Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that place them within 30 million miles of Earth.
The briefcase-size CubeSat deployed from the spacecraft and traveled behind it to record what happens. "Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a great pyramid or something like that," Chabot said. "But for Dimorphos, this really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption."
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