Double Asteroid Redirection Test

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, known as DART, was a NASA spacecraft built to find out whether a deliberate collision could nudge an asteroid onto a slightly different path. It was an impactor with a mass of 610 kilograms that carried no scientific payload, only navigation sensors, among them a 20 centimetre camera called DRACO that let it steer itself onto its target without human control. Launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on 24 November 2021, it struck Dimorphos, the 160 metre moonlet of the asteroid Didymos, on 26 September 2022, about 6.8 million miles from Earth. The impact shortened the moonlet's orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, far beyond the 73 second success threshold. DART was a joint project of NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and it also demonstrated a NEXT ion thruster and a new flat high-gain antenna. An Italian CubeSat, LICIACube, rode along and photographed the impact and its debris.