‘This one’s for the dinosaurs’: how the world reacted to Nasa’s asteroid smashing success - The Guardian

The Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission on Tuesday marked humanity’s first ever attempt at moving an asteroid in space.

Scientists at Nasa and Johns Hopkins University applauded and hugged each other on Tuesday after Dart, the size of a vending machine, successfully crashed into Dimorphos, a football field-sized asteroid that posed no risk to Earth.

Nasa expects that the orbit of Dimorphos around a larger asteroid – Didymos, which is 780 metres in diameter – will have shortened by about 1%, or roughly 10 minutes!

ATLAS observations of the DART spacecraft impact at Didymos

Last night, Nicolas Erasmus (SAAO) and Amanda Sickafoose (@planetarysci) successfully observed DART's impact with Dimorphos using the Mookodi instrument on the SAAO's 1-m Lesedi telescope.@fallingstarIfA also did a very similar measurement using ATLAS-Sutherland.#DART #NASA pic.twitter.com/olr4gV5SOV