On Sept. 26, 2022, NASA plans to change an asteroid’s orbit.
The large binary asteroid Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos currently pose no threat to Earth. But by crashing a 1,340-pound (610-kilogram) probe into Didymos’ moon at a speed of approximately 14,000 mph (22,500 kph), NASA is going to complete the world’s first full-scale planetary defense mission as a proof of concept. This mission is called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART.
