DART
NASA's first planetary defence test: a 610 kg spacecraft that deliberately rammed Dimorphos, the small moon of asteroid Didymos, at about 6.1 km/s. It steered itself onto the target in its last hours using only its own camera, while the Italian cubesat LICIACube, released two weeks earlier, photographed the impact. The collision on 26 September 2022 shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 33 minutes, showing that an asteroid can be nudged off course.
Key figures
- Builder
- Johns Hopkins APL
- Status
- Retired
- First flight
- 2021
- Last flight
- 2022
- Height
- 1.3 m
- Mass at launch
- 0.61 t