NASA’s asteroid target practice may not have been the success we thought

Image: Close-up images showing the ejecta plume created after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft impacted the asteroid moon Dimorphos in September 2022. Image credit: NASA DART team and LICIACube. CC BY 4.0 (no modifications). Article by Elisha Sauers. Mashable – July 10, 2025. Research article: The Planetary Science Journal.

When NASA smacked an asteroid with a spacecraft the size of a vending machine in 2022, the mission was rather quickly declared a victory. DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, sought to prove whether humans could one day nudge a killer space rock off course. The crash did, in fact, shift the harmless moonlet Dimorphos’ orbit by 33 minutes. But new research led by the University of Maryland suggests the results of that target practice are way less clear-cut than anyone imagined. […]

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