NASA didn’t just redirect an asteroid — it reshaped it

NASA’s DART mission didn’t just put a dent in tiny asteroid moonlet Dimorphos: the impact may have actually changed Dimorphos’s shape entirely.

Dimorphos, an asteroid about 500 feet wide, orbits a ten-times-larger asteroid called Didymos. Last February, NASA crashed a 580-kilogram spacecraft called DART into Dimorphos, knocking the moonlet onto a different orbital path around Didymos. A recent study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. suggests that Didymos is so small, and so loosely held together, that the DART impact actually deformed the whole moonlet instead of leaving a crater. That could have interesting implications for future efforts to protect ourselves from much larger asteroids that wander too close to Earth. READ MORE FROM INVERSE