NASA’s DART Mission, which was launched in November 2021, has finally managed to collide successfully with the Dimorphos asteroid. This is the first time in human history that we have been able to test the possibility of changing the route of a non-terrestrial body. 

Watch the moment of impact right here:

Regarding the latest launch, NASA’s livestream commentator said, “Usually Nasa spacecraft are intended to operate for many years, or even decades, but not Dart. Dart was built to be destroyed. Dart is a mission of firsts, proving that a spacecraft can autonomously seek, find and approach a target in space that’s so far away we don’t even know what it looks like.”

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Andy Rivkin, the DART investigation team lead, explained why the dual asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos were the perfect test subjects for the mission: “We needed something with a moon that was small enough that we could move it with a strike from a spacecraft, but not so small that we wrecked the moon. So when you kind of tick off all the possibilities, Didymos ended up as the best choice, and really the only choice, that would provide a mission in this time period.”

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The DART Mission, during its point of impact, struck Dimporphos at a speed of 15,000mph (24,140km/h). Footage of what happened post impact will be made available by a satellite belonging to the Italian Space Agency called Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids or LICIACube, which had detached itself from DART on September 11, and had been travelling behind the spacecraft.

In a statement released after the impact, Lori Graze, NASA’s planetary science division director, said, “We’re embarking on a new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous hazardous asteroid impact. What an amazing thing. We’ve never had that capability before.”