NASA successfully smacked its DART spacecraft into an asteroid
against Near Earth Objects. The vending machine-sized DART impactor vehicle was travelling at roughly 14,000 MPH when it fatally crossed Dimorphos' path nearly 68 million miles away from Earth.
Whether future iterations of a planetary defense system brimming with satellites willing to go all June Bug vs Chrysler Windshield against true planet-killer asteroids remains to be seen. Dimorphos itself is the smaller of a pair of gravitationally-entangled asteroids — its parent rock is more than five times as large — but both are dwarfed by the space rock that hit Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out 75 percent of multicellular life on the planet while gouging out the Gulf of Mexico.
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