🌍 NASA’s DART Mission & The Future of Planetary Defense 🚀 NASA’s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was the world’s first real test of planetary defense. In 2022, the spacecraft deliberately crashed into an asteroid called Dimorphos to see if we could change its orbit. And it worked — proving that humanity can, in fact, push an asteroid off its collision course with Earth. This is only the beginning of planetary defense. Future systems could include: Stronger impactors to deal wit

Impactful observations of data from NASA's #DARTMission are uncovering how some binary asteroid pairs come to be and change over time. In 2022, the DART mission sent a spacecraft to intentionally collide with the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos and was effective in shifting its orbit. | NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center