An illustration of NASA’s DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system.
Hurtling through the solar system at hypersonic speed on Monday, NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed itself into a distant asteroid in a test of the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth.
The finale to the suicide spaceflight, 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.
