NASA DART Mission – A Great Success In the Sky

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With space being one of the final frontiers for us, every bit of news from NASA is always exciting. When a new project is announced, we expect some development of the sustainability of Mars, new satellites that can better take images of what we cannot see, or even newly discovered planets. What we don’t expect to hear, however, is a spacecraft crashing into an asteroid. That’s precisely what happened on Monday, September 26th, and the event was met with applause and wonder by the scientists at NASA, and the rest of the world. The project was part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which aims to institute a planetary defense system via means of throwing things into other things. In a more specific sense, the hope of the mission was to test if launching a spacecraft into the side of an asteroid would be able to throw it off its predicted course. A project like this could help us tremendously in the future, as we no longer have to worry if the next asteroid close to us could hit us. Now, we have steps toward a defense. Not only did NASA manage to have the spacecraft hit the asteroid, but it did actually knock it off-course, providing a potentially viable option for space defense. Only the first test of many, yes, but still a phenomenal start for a new means of defense for our planet.