NASA’s DART Spacecraft Nudges an Asteroid

On 26 September 2022, a robotic American spacecraft slammed deliberately into a small celestial body millions of miles from Earth. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, managed by NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, sought to evaluate kinetic impact as a viable method of planetary defense against potential near-Earth hazards. Rather than attempting an interception of a genuine threat, planners selected the binary asteroid pair consisting of the larger Didymos and its orbiting moonlet, Dimorphos, a target system that posed no danger to Earth.

DART's journey began on 24 November 2021, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The rocket placed the spacecraft directly on an Earth escape trajectory, leaving DART to perform only a few trajectory-correction burns with simple chemical thrusters during a transit of more than ten months.