NASA smashed into an asteroid so hard it may have sent boulders flying into space

Very few of the billions of asteroids and comets around the Sun are a threat to Earth.

The epic collision of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which took place on September 26, 2022, was the space agency’s first major experiment at managing the existential threat of a near-Earth asteroid. The experiment sought to learn if we could knock one off course.

Early results were positive. DART precisely struck Dimorphos, the moonlet of the larger near-Earth asteroid Didymos located 6.8 million miles away from the planet. It’s an achievement NASA Administrator Bill Nelson described as a “watershed moment for humanity.” More good news poured in weeks later, when NASA confirmed the crash altered Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos. FULL STORY from Inverse