NASA changed an asteroid’s orbital path around the sun, a first for humankind

NASA's DART mission achieved a historic first by altering a natural object's orbit around the sun when it crashed into asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022. The collision slowed Dimorphos's orbit around companion asteroid Didymos by 30 minutes and changed the binary system's solar orbit by 12 microns per second. This demonstration proves humanity can deflect potentially dangerous asteroids, with debris from the impact doubling the spacecraft's momentum transfer and significantly enhancing the deflection effect.