NASA’s DART Spacecraft Slams Into Asteroid in Effort to Alter Its Orbit

An uncrewed spacecraft smashed into an asteroid Monday in an effort to deflect the distant space rock, the dramatic climax of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission to test whether the technique could one day be used to protect Earth.

“We’re all just losing our minds right now,” said Harrison Agrusa, a University of Maryland astrophysicist and investigation team member on the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission.