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After the DART Briefing: What Changed Was an Orbit
Maya and Owen left a public science briefing with pages of hurried notes. The talk had described a collision in space, but its importance lay in a change that no human eye could see directly. Over coffee, they began to compare notes.
What DART tested was whether a spacecraft could alter an asteroid's motion through a deliberate collision. NASA designed the mission as the first dedicated demonstration of this planetary defence method, known as kinetic impact.
On 26 September 2022, the DART spacecraft struck Dimorphos. This small body is a moonlet that orbits the larger asteroid Didymos, so researchers could study one body moving around the other.
Nor did either asteroid pose a threat to Earth. The pair was chosen as a safe test system, not because astronomers expected it to hit our planet.