NASA’s Asteroid-Smashing DART Mission Nudged A Space Rock Into A New Solar Path

Back in 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully smashed a spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a kinetic impact experiment to see if we could knock a lethal space rock off course. New analysis this week reveals that the impact did make a difference and that DART altered the entire binary asteroid’s path around the sun, which bodes well for future planetary defense systems.

While previous data focused on how Dimorphos’s orbit around its larger partner, Didymos, shortened by 33 minutes, the latest findings (published in Science Advances) track the heliocentric change, or rather the duo’s collective journey around the sun. Scientists found that the collision slowed the system’s orbital speed by approximately 11.7 microns per second. While that shift is roughly equivalent to 1.7 inches per hour, such a minuscule change compounded over years of travel can translate into a ...