NASA says a spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away last month succeeded in shifting its orbit.
The space agency attempted the first test of its kind two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth’s way.
The Dart spacecraft carved a crater into the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26, hurling debris out into space and creating a cometlike trail of dust and rubble stretching several thousand miles . It took days of telescope observations from Chile and South Africa to determine how much the impact altered the path of the 525-foot asteroid around its companion, a much bigger space rock.Before the impact, the moonlet took 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its parent asteroid.
"We’ve been imagining this for years and to have it finally be real is really quite a thrill," said NASA program scientist Tom Statler.
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