NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, better known as DART, successfully shifted the orbit of an asteroid known as Dimorphos — a huge victory for local scientists and engineers whose work was involved in the mission, NASA officials announced Tuesday.
The space agency purposely crashed a spacecraft into the harmless asteroid, which orbited a larger asteroid, known as Didymos, millions of miles away, in late September as a test to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth’s way.
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., designed and led the DART mission for NASA while the Jet Propulsion Lab’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, an element of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, was tasked with determining the location of Didymos in space within 16 miles of its exact location.
