The DART mission, NASA's first attempt to prove whether it is possible to shift an asteroid away from a collision course with Earth, has been described as a "great success" by scientists involved in the project.
The target asteroid system of DART, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was the 2,560-foot (780 meters) wide space rock Didymos and its smaller orbiting "moonlet" Dimorphos, just 530 feet (160 m) in diameter. The DART mission impacted Dimorphos on Sept. 26, 2022, with the impact and its aftermath observed by numerous ground-based observatories, as well as space-based instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). DART's impact was also followed by the LICIACube spacecraft, which traveled to Dimorphos and Didymos aboard DART.
