It was clear within hours of DART’s crash into the asteroid Dimorphos — the moonlet orbiting a larger asteroid, Didymos — that NASA’s first attempt at planetary defense was a success. But, from 6.8 million miles away, can we tell just how much of a success it was? That’s what a set of five papers published today in Nature by multiple international teams — covering every continent but Antarctica —have set out to find, and the answers are looking up for keeping future asteroids away from our home.
