NASA’s DART objective hammered its target asteroid into a brand-new shape. Here’s how
Dimorphos, imaged by DART simply 2 seconds before the spacecraft crashed into it. (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL)
The shape of the asteroid Dimorphos was altered when NASA's DART spacecraft intentionally crashed into it in 2022 as part of a test of mankind's planetary defense abilities.DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was developed to reveal whether we might divert a possibly harmful asteroid far from Earth. It was sent out to a binary asteroid, in which the 170-meter-wide (560-foot-wide) Dimorphos orbits a bigger 760-meter (2,493-foot-wide) area rock called Didymos. When DART affected Dimorphos on 26 September 2022, astronomers had the ability to determine just how much the effect had actually pushed the asteroid by determining how the area rock's orbit around Didymos alt...