WATCH: Final moments of the DARTMission when the NASA spacecraft successfully collided with the asteroid Dimorphos some 6.8 million miles from Earth
Humanity's first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations center outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after DART was launched.
DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA's flight directors, with control handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey. Neither object presents any actual threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test could not create a new hazard by mistake.
Also, the two asteroids' relative proximity to Earth and dual configuration make them ideal for the first proof-of-concept mission of DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.The mission represented a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft had to crash to succeed. DART flew directly into Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour , creating the force scientists hope will be enough to shift its orbital track closer to the parent asteroid.
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