An uncrewed spacecraft smashed into an asteroid Monday in an effort to deflect the distant space rock, the dramatic climax of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission to test whether the technique could one day be used to protect Earth. The mission is known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
The 1,300-pound DART spacecraft was traveling at more than 14,000 miles an hour when it hit the asteroid Dimorphos, a much more massive, 525-foot-wide space rock that orbits a larger one known as Didymos. The asteroid pair—what astronomers call a binary asteroid—was about 7 million miles from Earth at the time of impact and isn’t a threat to our planet.
