The probe managed to reduce the orbit in 32 minutes
A Confirmed by NASA On Tuesday the impact of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft against the asteroid Dimorphos, located about 11 million kilometers from Earth, managed to divert its trajectory, as predicted.
The administrator of the American space agency, Bill Nelson, pointed out that, before the collision with Dimorphos, DART took 11 hours and 55 minutes to bypass another celestial body – Didymos -, with which it forms a system of double asteroids.
The probe managed to reduce the orbit in 32 minutes.
“It would have been a success if I slowed it down by only about 10 minutes, but it actually slowed it down by 32,” Nelson said, congratulating him on the success of his mission in September this year.
DART collided “successfully” with the asteroid Dimorphos, in what was humanity’s first test to defend Earth from future space objects.
The collision occurred at 19:14 local time on the east coast of the United States (00:14, in Lisbon), 9.6 million kilometers away, with DART hitting the small space rock – moon of the binary system formed also from the asteroid Didymos – at 22,500 kilometers per hour.
The $ 325 million (approximately € 338 million) mission was the first attempt to change the position of an asteroid or any other natural space object.
