It will take several weeks before scientists can say whether the experiment has worked. In a live question-and-answer session after the crash, senior leaders from Nasa and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory said the mission was "straight down the middle" and nothing went wrong.ĭimorphos is part of a binary asteroid system and orbits Didymos, which takes around 11 hours and 55 minutes.īut astronomers at Nasa hope that Dart, while destroying itself in the process, has shortened this orbital period by about 10 minutes. A triumph for humanity in the name of planetary defence," a member of Nasa's team said in a video recorded in the control room as the collision took place. Nasa successfully crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid. The US space agency's staff cheered and clapped in a video shared online as the vending machine-sized spacecraft successfully smashed into Dimorphos, which is the size of a football stadium. "IMPACT SUCCESS!" Nasa tweeted after its spacecraft, known as Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart), collided with the 170-metre wide (560ft) asteroid about 00:20 UK time on Tuesday. But the aim of the mission was to demonstrate that dangerous incoming rocks can be deflected by deliberately smashing into them. The asteroid - named Dimorphos - posed no threat to Earth. By Asher is the moment Nasa successfully crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid as part of a mission to test the possibility of defending Earth from outer space.
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