NASA has confirmed the space craft that they deliberately crashed into an asteroid last month, has succeeded in nudging the rocky moonlet out of its natural orbit.
It is the first-time humanity has altered the motion of a celestial body.
Findings from space observations shown at a NASA briefing prove that the DART spacecraft on 26 September achieved its primary objective: changing the direction of an asteroid through sheer kinetic force.
This asteroid wasn’t on a path to hit Earth, the experiment was to learn whether it was possible to change the course of an asteroid in case it is needed in the future.
The US$330 million DART mission, which was seven years in development, was the world’s first test of a defence system designed to prevent a potential meteorite strike.
Dart, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is only around the size of a fridge but by crashing directly into Dimorphos it was measured to have changed its path by “tens of metres”.
