Space & Astronomy

NASA's DART mission changed parent asteroid's trajectory, study finds

By T.K. Randall
March 10, 2026 ·  0 comments

Image: Artist's illustration of NASA's DART Mission
Credit: (PD) NASA One of the best defenses we may ever have against the possibility of a cataclysmic asteroid strike is to send a spacecraft known as a kinetic impactor to smash into it, thus altering its trajectory just enough for it to miss the Earth.

To test this idea, NASA launched a mission back in 2021 known as DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test).

For the mission, scientists chose to send the probe to collide with Dimorphos - a moonlet of the asteroid Didymos - which measures around 160 meters across and poses no actual threat to the Earth.

It later turned out that, after smashing headlong into the space rock at 14,000mph, the spacecraft actually did alter the trajectory of Dimorphos - proving that the concept could work.Now, though, a new study has revealed that DART did more than change the path of this object - it actually also changed the trajectory of the parent asteroid Didymos as well.

While it's important to note that the actual change is tiny - just a fraction of a second out of a 770-day orbital period - it still proves that something like this can be done.

Even a small change can mean the difference between an asteroid hitting or missing the Earth.

"This is a tiny change to the orbit, but given enough time, even a tiny change can grow to a significant deflection," said NASA's Thomas Statler.

"The team's amazingly precise measurement again validates kinetic impact as a technique for defending Earth against asteroid hazards and shows how a binary asteroid might be deflected by impacting just one member of the pair."

Source: NASA.gov | Comments (0)

Tags: Asteroid