Cape Canaveral – Thousands of space enthusiasts around the world watched breathtakingly Monday, as DART crashed into the 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid named Dimorphos. The controlled collision is NASA’s unprecedented dress rehearsal for a doomsday scenario incase a killer object attempts to collide with our planet.

The $325 million mission is the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.

Telescopes around the world aimed at the collision to capture the moment, however it will take as long as a couple of months to determine how much the asteroid’s path was changed.

“As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success,” Mission Control’s Elena Adams later told a news conference, the room filling with applause. “I think Earthlings should sleep better. Definitely, I will.”

The vending machine-size Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) launched last November, navigated to its target using new technology developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft builder and mission manager.

With an image beaming back to Earth every second, Adams and other ground controllers in Laurel, Maryland, watched with growing excitement as Dimorphos loomed larger and larger in the field of view alongside its bigger companion.

Within minutes, Dimorphos was alone in the pictures; it looked like a giant gray lemon, but with boulders and rubble on the surface. The last image froze on the screen as the radio transmission ended.

Scientists insisted Dart would not shatter Dimorphos. The spacecraft packed a scant 1,260 pounds (570 kilograms), compared with the asteroid’s 11 billion pounds (5 billion kilograms). But that should be plenty to shrink its 11-hour, 55-minute orbit around Didymos.

“Now is when the science starts,” said NASA’s Lori Glaze, planetary science division director. “Now we’re going to see for real how effective we were.”
-AP