Was the DART mission successful?

More huge asteroids to approach Earth in the coming weeks One of the closest approaches Earth will see will come Friday, when the asteroid WK1 2021 , about 64 feet long, will come within 652,000 miles of Earth.

You might have heard the buzz about an asteroid called 4660 Nereus, coming closest to Earth on Saturday, December 11, 2021. Close is a relative term. The 1,083-foot (330-meter) asteroid will come within 2.4 million miles (3.9 million km) of Earth, still about 10 times farther away than the moon.

At 1:21 a.m. EST on November 24, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. In the ensuing few hours, the spacecraft established communication with mission operators and successfully unfurled its solar arrays .

Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact . Goals. Demonstrate asteroid deflection with a kinetic impactor. Launch.