US space probe DART has successfully altered the course of an asteroid

U.S. probe DART has successfully completed its mission to change the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorph in an experiment to protect the Earth from potentially dangerous space objects. This was announced on Tuesday by the head of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Bill Nelson.

Nelson added that, according to data obtained from telescopes from Earth, the orbital rotation of Dimorph, which orbits around the larger asteroid Didim, has shortened by 32 minutes, and its position relative to Didim has also changed.

P.S. DART was launched in November 2021 from US Space Force Base Vandenberg in California using SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle. In late September, NASA reported that the vehicle collided with the asteroid Dimorph, which is more than 11 million kilometres from Earth.