NASA’s ‘DART’ Mission Succeeds In Changing Asteroid’s Orbit

NASA’s “DART” mission proved to be a success after the spacecraft slammed into an asteroid and shortened its orbit even more than anticipated. NBC News’ Tom Costello shares more on the major accomplishment.

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[icomeinpeace]

Soooo cool, this is literally a physics question's solution put into practice, wow.

[DrakestoneMillingCompnay]

THIS IS NEWS!!!! This is the stuff that matters!

[brandonozoria]

The way he said 'after all, its the only we have. " was bittersweet and chilling.

[dee]

Protect our home planet, after all, it’s the only one we had - this line hits hard .. 🌏

[captainireland]

Imagine they changed the astroids trajectory so that it accidentally hits earth

[d.b.]

This needs to be one of our top priorities.

[bajamcguide]

So awesome, pretty amazing what we can do if we put our minds to something

[Nynex]

slowed by 35 minutes is another 3 beers.

[brianjohnson]

The ramifications of this little experiment have yet to be seen. Humans cannot understand their actions in galactic terms

[ebogar]

Why didn't they think of this in the Armageddon movie? Oil drillers died for nothing. 😆

[AnthonyBackmanOffical]

Great. Now what about detection? Oumuamua didn't get registered until 40 days after it's closest point to the Earth. Deflection is a moot point if we don't know the objects until they have passed. The Chelyabinsk meteor was the same situation. Super glad this measure works but it's only half of the situation.

[coffeeisthepathtovictory]

Asteroids are dangerous, we must be ready. Thank you NASA

[community]

So what they hit was rather small and they knew about it in advance. But how about the 6 mile wide object that wiped out the dinosaurs? It would take a rocket several miles in length to knock that thing out of any kind of orbit or trajectory. And that would be impossible.

[novaboy]

Nuclear Weapons be like...Hello? I'm still here and about to rock your world anytime now~Right Putin honey?

[Showmetheevidence-]

Have we just created the biggest "butterfly effect" EVER?

[coreychristoffersen]

This is (directly) another thing I don't understand about the majority of my fellow mankind. All of us now know by now or at least we should that an asteroid that strikes the earth doesn't necessarily have to be that big to cause cataclysmic damage. Which is why I don't understand how is that every nation they can doesn't contribute in some way so collectively there would be a total annual budget of several hundreds of billions of dollars. To ensure as quickly as possible that there isn't a worse case scenario. Something that the world body would view as the most important insurance policy we will ever have.

[madman__]

shoot. send an unmanned space x rocket if we're lined up with a biggin

[jpmcfrosty]

Imagine if they had knocked into an orbit directly back at earth lol

[Aladeen]

Nice, might have been cheaper to call Harry Stamper lol.

[davidharrington]

Great mission but a technical question needs to be asked… if we know anything it’s F= m•a and orbital mechanics. Do we need to spend hundreds of millions to verify it?? We know the mass and velocity of the projectile to within a tenth of one percent, as well as the mass and original orbital parameters of the asteroid. Any second year engineering or physics student could compute the results on the back of an envelope. The true challenge was to hit the asteroid in a particular spot and in a particular spot of its orbit. Once that was done the result was guaranteed. The only unknown was the extra contribution of the ejecta momentum.