A couple of weeks ago, NASA torpedoed the asteroid Dimorphos with the DART spacecraft with a direct hit. I’m still amazed at how well that went…a spacecraft that flew millions of miles to intercept a double-asteroid system and didn’t even see it’s target until 20 minutes prior to impact and still nail that rock dead centre blows my mind.
The goal of the project was to see if they could alter Dimorphos’ orbit round it’s parent Didymos by shortening it’s orbit by about ten minutes.
After these past couple of weeks of observations, apparently DART is quite the overachiever after having altered Dimorphos’ orbit by a staggering 32 minutes!
Obviously, they weren’t shooting a planet killer like the one that took out the dinosaurs but the concept of intercepting and altering the trajectory of the target does seem proven at this point.
Well done DART team! 🙂