Why is NASA DART important?

DART is the first planetary defense mission to test a method of deflecting an asteroid on course to hit Earth. The threat from asteroid impacts is small, but real — and preventable. Missions like DART are essential to help us understand how to stop dangerous asteroids .

DART is a spacecraft designed to impact an asteroid as a test of technology . DART’s target asteroid is NOT a threat to Earth. … The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for the DART demonstration.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards , launched Wednesday at 1:21 a.m. EST on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

DART is a spacecraft designed to impact an asteroid as a test of technology . DART’s target asteroid is NOT a threat to Earth. … The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for the DART demonstration.