NASA DART Team Confirms Slamming Spacecraft Into Asteroids Can Deflect Them
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
Credit: NASA
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TechTranscript
00:00 We're embarking on a new era of humankind.
00:07 Dynamos and Dimorphos make a great target.
00:14 We needed an asteroid with a moon that you can see from ground-based telescopes around the world.
00:20 We're doing this mission to prove that we can deflect an asteroid.
00:29 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
00:33 And liftoff of the Falcon 9 at dark on NASA's first planetary defense test to intentionally crash into an asteroid.
00:45 Even if we do everything right, our sensors work well, our spacecraft is doing well, even then we might still miss.
00:54 4, 3, 2, 1.
00:59 For the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary object.
01:11 NASA confirms that DART successfully changed the targeted asteroid's trajectory.
01:23 Using the ground-based telescopes around the world to watch the system and see how it's affected by this impact event.
01:29 This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity.
01:40 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology