“In 2022, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid named Dimorphos. The goal of this interplanetary smashup was to prove that if a killer space rock ever threatened Earth in the future, humans could deflect it and save our world.

The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, worked: The crash shortened Dimorphos’s orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos, by 32 minutes. It also generated a giant cloud of dust and debris captured by telescopes around the world and in space.

A new study shows that DART achieved more than that. Scientists found that the spacecraft’s impact shifted not only the orbit of Dimorphos around its parent asteroid, Didymos, but also the trajectory of the pair around our sun.”

From New York Times.