Behind the Spacecraft: NASA’s DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test

NASA is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid… on purpose! Our DARTmission is a first-of-its-kind PlanetaryDefense test to change the motion of an asteroid in space so that we could use this technique if an asteroid were ever discovered to be a threat to Earth.

The DART mission is a test of a technique that could be used to mitigate the threat of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth should one be discovered in the future. DART’s target is not a threat to Earth.

While no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth in the next 100 years, only about 40% of those asteroids have been found as of October 2021.

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