According to NASA head Bill Nelson, the impactor is the size of a refrigerator, designed to test
“DART reduced the orbit from 11 hours55 minutes to 11 hours 23 minutes,” he said. The acceleration of Dimorphos' orbital period was 32 minutes higher than NASA's expectations of 10 minutes. “We've shown the world that NASA is serious about protecting this planet,” Nelson added.
“We are all responsible for our nativeplanets. At the end of the day, this is the only thing we have,” concluded the NASA administrator. “The experiment showed that NASA is trying to be prepared for everything the Universe throws at us. This is a tipping point for planetary defense and everything humanity."
Before the collision, NASA determined the minimumsuccessfully changing the orbital period of Dimorphos as a change of 73 seconds or more. Early data shows that DART has exceeded this minimum benchmark by more than 25 times.
The research team is still collecting datafrom ground-based observatories around the world, as well as from radars at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
A pair of asteroids orbit the Sun every2.1 years and does not pose a threat to the Earth. But they are ideal for studying a method of planetary defense using “kinetic impact” in case the Earth is threatened by a real space object.
The success of DART as a proof of concept made science fiction a reality. Examples can be found in films such as Armageddon and Don't Look Up.
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