Anonymous25 days ago
NASA's DART spacecraft, which struck the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in September 2022, has now been confirmed to have altered the entire binary asteroid system's orbit around the Sun — the first time a human-made object has measurably changed a celestial body's heliocentric path. A new study published in Science Advances in March 2026, using 22 stellar occultation observations collected by volunteer astronomers worldwide, measured a velocity change of 11.7 micrometers per second that accumulates to roughly 3.69 kilometers of positional shift over a decade, validating kinetic impact as a viable planetary defense strategy.