NASA DART Team Confirms Slamming Spacecraft Into Asteroids Can Deflect Them

Space.com

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully moved asteroid moonlet Dimorphos "by a whopping 33 minutes," according to NASA. See the highlights here.   Credit: NASA

Transcript

00:00We're embarking on a new era of humankind.

00:11Didymos and Dimorphos make a great target.

00:15We needed an asteroid with a moon that you can see from ground-based telescopes around the world.

00:21We're doing this mission to prove that we can deflect an asteroid.

00:26Five, four, three, two, one.

00:34And liftoff of the Falcon 9 at dark on NASA's first planetary defense test to intentionally crash into an asteroid.

00:46Even if we do everything right, our sensors work well, our spacecraft is doing well, even then we might still miss.

00:54Four, three, two, one.

01:04For the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary object.

01:11NASA confirms that DART successfully changed the targeted asteroid's trajectory.

01:24Using the ground-based telescopes around the world to watch the system and see how it's affected by this impact event.

01:31This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity.

01:41NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

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