NASA’s DART Spacecraft Crashed Into And Successfully Shifted Dimorphos Orbit
NASA recently crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to push the rocky traveler off its trajectory. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test – or DART – was meant to test one potential strategy for preventing an asteroid from colliding with Earth. The collision occurred on Sept. 27, 2022, and on Oct. 11, 2022, NASA announced that the mission had successfully changed the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos. David Barnhart is a professor of astronautics at the University of Southern California and director of the Space Engineering Research Center there. He watched NASA’s live stream of the successful mission and explains what happened.
This video, sped up 10 times the actual speed, shows a series of images taken one second apart by the DART spacecraft as it approached Didymos and the sm...