DART had to travel for 10 months across space. Sci-fi and reality have truly collided in the uncanny valley of the 21st century. We've been dreaming about blasting space rocks from the sky for decades. We’re living in a new golden age of sci-fi-inspired astronomy.įor nerds like me, DART’s hole-in-one was a fantasy come true. This summer, the James Webb Space Telescope was successfully deployed into deep space to beam back spectacular images of such wonders as Neptune’s Rings, the Tarantula Nebula and the Cartwheel Galaxy. ( Amazing, they are still ticking after 45 years in operation.) Then came landing spacecraft on Mars. The Voyager crafts of the 1970s probed the far reaches of our solar system - and are now exploring interstellar space, a place never before visited by human-made devices. After the first lunar landing in 1969, humankind could check that task off our bucket list. Since at least Jules Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune” (“From the Earth to the Moon”), published in 1865, we’ve been imagining traveling to the stars.

The DART mission was a test - a dry run for some future potential save-the-planet, endgame scenario. Now astronomers will study how much DART caused the asteroid to speed up. Dimorphos had been innocently drifting through space some 7 million miles from Earth. To be fair, that asteroid wasn’t on some ‘roid-rage mission to obliterate Earth. Threaten our planet? Get a little love-tap, Earth-style. As NPR reported, “ Move over, Bruce Willis: NASA crashed into an asteroid to test planetary defense.”

The goal was to knock the rock off its course. In a mission called DART (for Double Asteroid Redirection Test), astronomers flew a golf-cart-sized spacecraft at 4.1 miles per second into a smallish, 530-foot-across asteroid named Dimorphos.

On Monday night, NASA successfully pulled off a feat of deep-space jujitsu. Facebook Email A television at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, captures the final images from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) just before it smashes into the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept.

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