NASA’s DART mission is a step toward preparing the world for a potential future asteroid strike like the one which killed dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, the chances of which are very slim in our lifetime, Indian scientists said.
In a first-of-its-kind mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully crashed into an asteroid on Tuesday to test whether space rocks that might threaten Earth in the future could be nudged safely out of the way.
DART, the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration, targeted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small body just 160 meters in diameter.
