The main goal of planetary defense is to protect humanity’s home planet from asteroids, a threat that has routinely caused mass-extinction events throughout the multibillion-year history of life on Earth. Depending on the results NASA and dozens of other groups will now attempt to glean from ground and space telescopes, the successful impact could be a major leap forward for the field of planetary defense.Ĭongratulations on successfully crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid!- SpaceX September 26, 2022 Ten months later, the spacecraft has accomplished exactly that, successfully crashing into a target about 160 meters (530 ft) wide just 17 meters away from a perfect ‘bullseye’ after traveling for ten months and hundreds of millions of kilometers through space. The goal: slam into the small asteroid moon Dimorphos at an eyewatering speed of 6.3 kilometers per second (14,000 mph / Mach 18). The rocket performed flawlessly, continuing a streak of successful launches, and boosted DART on its way to a near-Earth asteroid pair. Ten months after launching into interplanetary space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft has successfully impacted an asteroid moon.įalcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) carrying the 630-kilogram (~1400 lb) spacecraft on November 24th, 2021.
