NASA’s spacecraft on the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully slammed into an asteroid called Dimorphos on September 26. This is the world’s first demonstration of planetary defense technology, testing whether an impact could deflect an asteroid’s orbit. NASA announced on Tuesday that DART successfully deflected the orbit of an asteroid. Dimorphos is an asteroid less than 200 meters in diameter, and DART is designed for a head-on impact, slowing down its orbit. Ground observations now confirm that its orbit has shortened. It took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete one orbit before impact, which was shortened to 11 hours and 23 minutes after impact, a reduction of 32 minutes. NASA’s radar observations confirmed that the distance between Dimorphos and the other Didymos in the binary asteroid system was reduced, by tens of meters.
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