A NASA space probe slammed into an asteroid Monday at breakneck speed in an unprecedented test to see if a rock might one day threaten Earth.
The crash was against a harmless asteroid 9.6 million kilometers (7 million miles) away.
The probe called Dart hit the tiny space rock at 14,000 miles per hour (22,500 kilometers per hour). Scientists hope the impact will create a crater, hurl rocks and dust into space and—most importantly—alter the asteroid’s orbit.
Telescopes from around the world and in space focused on the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. Although the impact was immediately obvious — Dart’s radio signal was abruptly cut off — it will take days or even weeks to determine how much the asteroid’s trajectory was altered.
The $325 million mission is the first attempt to reposition an asteroid or any other natural object in space.
“No, this is not the plot of a movie,” tweeted Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, earlier in the day. “We’ve all seen it on movies like ‘Armageddon,’ but the stakes are high in real life,” he said in a prerecorded video.
Monday’s target was a 160-meter (525-foot) diameter asteroid called Dimorph. It is actually a moon of Didymos, which means twin in Greek, a rapidly spinning asteroid that is five times larger than its companion. Dimorfo arose from material that came off Didymus.
Both have been orbiting the Sun for ages without threatening Earth, making them ideal candidates for this test.
Launched last November, the Dart probe — short for Binary Asteroid Redirection Test — navigated to its target using new technology developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft’s builder and administrator of the mission.