In 2021, a spacecraft was launched on a first-ever suicide mission to try to deflect an asteroid on impact in space in the revolutionary planetary defense experiment. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, known as DART, was designed to test whether a spacecraft could change the movement of an asteroid by hitting it. DART was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Its target was Dimorphos, a small moonlet orbiting the asteroid Didymos. The asteroid system was not a threat to Earth. The spacecraft reached Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, and deliberately collided with it to measure the change in its orbit.
