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We Punched an Asteroid, and the Science Results are In
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) worked better than we had hoped!
On September 26, 2022, NASA completed its DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission, a groundbreaking effort to study the feasibility of deflecting asteroids that could potentially impact Earth. NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with Dimorphos, a small moonlet that orbited a larger Near-Earth Asteroid Didymos, to test kinetic impact. Kinetic impact is a planetary defense technique that involves steering a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid in hopes of deflecting its trajectory. You can read more about what happened during the mission here.
It’s worth explicitly noting that neither Dimorphos nor Didymos posed any hazard to Earth.
And on December 15, 2022, members of the DART team provided a preliminary post-collision analysis during the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Chicago. So, what did we learn?
Since DART’s collision, NASA has been monitoring the ejected matter from the impact to determine how it’s evolved over time and understand what DART achieved. Specifically, they were trying to find out how much of the impact was as a result of the spacecraft and how much was due to recoil produced by the ejection.
