by Stacy Liberatore and Jonathan Chadwick at Daily Mail
- NASA’s DART spacecraft has completed its mission to crash into an asteroid, in the first planetary defense test
- The ambitious mission aimed to nudge the asteroid from its orbit, but NASA won’t know the results for weeks
- But videos on social media depict the historic event as captured by telescopes in Hawaii and South Africa
Earth-based telescopes have captured the historic moment NASA‘s DART spacecraft crashed into an asteroid last night.
DART was launched from California last November – and finally completed its 10-month journey when it hit the asteroid Dimorphos at 7:14pm ET on Monday (00:14 BST Tuesday).
Dimorphos, around 560 feet in diameter, orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, both of which are around 6.8 million miles away from our planet.
DART hit the space rock at more than 14,000 miles per hour and was destroyed upon impact, while Dimorphos received a ‘small nudge’ intended to alter its trajectory by a fraction.
The mission aimed to alter the asteroid’s orbit…
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