Anonymous25 days ago
A new study published in Science Advances on March 6, 2026, confirms that NASA's 2022 DART mission — which crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos — not only shortened the moonlet's orbit around its companion by 33 minutes but also permanently altered the entire Didymos-Dimorphos binary system's orbit around the Sun by approximately 0.15 seconds. This marks the first time a human-made object has measurably changed a celestial body's heliocentric trajectory, validating kinetic impact as a viable planetary defense technique.