Nasa’s Dart mission to deflect an asteroid by smashing a spacecraft into it had a bigger effect than most scientists had predicted.
The US space agency announced on Tuesday that the Dart probe had cut the orbital period of the asteroid Dimorphos around its larger partner Didymos by 32 minutes as a result of its head-on collision on September 26.
Its success marks the first time humanity has deliberately changed the path of a celestial object and the first demonstration of deflection technology that could in future divert the path of an incoming asteroid to prevent a cataclysmic collision with Earth.
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