DART is a smashing success

History was made on 27 September when NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose. The goal of the mission, using the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) probe, was to find out if it is possible to change the direction of an asteroid’s path. Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the Sun (see panel). This one, named Dimorphos, is seven million miles away from Earth and not on track to hit it. NASA wanted to see if space rocks that might threaten Earth in the future could be safely moved away. The 160-metre-wide Dimorphos is about the size of a football stadium but it is orbiting a much bigger, 780-metre-wide, asteroid named Didymos. The theory behind the test was that crashing DART into the asteroid – a technique known…

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The Week Junior (Digital) - 1 Issue, 356

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