
NASA Says Dart Mission Succeeded In Shifting Asteroid's Orbit (theguardian.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles from Earth succeeded in shifting the orbit of the space rock, Nasa said on Tuesday, announcing the results of its first such test. The US space agency strategically launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test ("Dart") spacecraft into the path of the asteroid, thereby throwing it off course. Nasa hopes to be able to deflect any asteroid or comet that comes to pose a real threat to Earth.
Dart altered the orbit of the Dimorphos asteroid by 32 minutes. Glaze said the minimum requirement for changing the orbital period was "really only 73 seconds." Last year, in a test that cost $325 million, another Dart spacecraft, roughly the size of a vending machine, was destroyed when it slammed into an asteroid 7m miles away, at 14,000mph.In a tweet, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, said: "Congratulations to the team at Nasa for successfully altering the orbit of an asteroid. The Dart mission marks the first time humans have changed the motion of a celestial body in space, demonstrating technology that could one day be used to protect Earth."
The scientist and educator Bill Nye said: "We're celebrating ... because a mission like this could save the world."
The Nasa administrator, the former astronaut and Democratic Florida senator Bill Nelson, said: "We showed the world that Nasa is serious as a defender of this planet."
Lori Glaze, director of Nasa's planetary division, said: "Let's all just take a moment to soak this in. We're all here this afternoon because for the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body."
Dart altered the orbit of the Dimorphos asteroid by 32 minutes. Glaze said the minimum requirement for changing the orbital period was "really only 73 seconds." Last year, in a test that cost $325 million, another Dart spacecraft, roughly the size of a vending machine, was destroyed when it slammed into an asteroid 7m miles away, at 14,000mph.In a tweet, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, said: "Congratulations to the team at Nasa for successfully altering the orbit of an asteroid. The Dart mission marks the first time humans have changed the motion of a celestial body in space, demonstrating technology that could one day be used to protect Earth."
The scientist and educator Bill Nye said: "We're celebrating ... because a mission like this could save the world."
The Nasa administrator, the former astronaut and Democratic Florida senator Bill Nelson, said: "We showed the world that Nasa is serious as a defender of this planet."
Lori Glaze, director of Nasa's planetary division, said: "Let's all just take a moment to soak this in. We're all here this afternoon because for the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body."