NASA's DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on September 26 in a test of the world's first planetary defence system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth.
Humanity's first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations center outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after DART was launched.
The livestream showed images taken by DART's camera as the cube-shaped "impactor" vehicle, no bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, streaked into the asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
