Full impact of NASA's DART asteroid-smashing mission revealed in new studies

NASA's DART mission was the world's first test of a planetary defence system designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth. (Supplied: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL)

NASA's real-life Armageddon mission to move an asteroid off course was even more of a smashing success than early results indicated.

The world watched on as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft ploughed into Dimorphos, the tiny moon of near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos, last September.