NASA strike test successfully altered asteroid's trajectory

An illustration of NASA’s DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system. © Steve Gribben, Nasa, Reuters

A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.

The space agency attempted the first test of its kind two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth’s way.