NASA Moves Asteroid's Path Around Sun for First Time

For the first time in human history, we've changed how a natural object moves around the sun.

When NASA smashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, scientists knew they'd nudged it off course around its companion asteroid Didymos. The collision slowed Dimorphos's orbit by 30 minutes, proving we could potentially defend Earth from incoming asteroids.

But new research published in Science Advances reveals something even bigger. By pushing Dimorphos, NASA actually changed the entire binary asteroid system's path around the sun by 12 microns per second, or about 370 meters per year.

"If an asteroid is ever on its way to hitting the Earth, we can more confidently now say that we have the ability to push them around and away from the Earth," says lead researcher Rahil Makadia, who was a planetary defense scientist at the University of Illinois when the study was conducted.

The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), sent a 570-kilogram spacecraft crashing into Dimorphos at over 22,000 kilometers per hour. Neither asteroid poses any danger to Earth, but they made perfect targets for testing our planetary defense capabilities.

Makadia's team combined radar measurements and observations as the asteroids passed in front of the sun to track the change. They discovered the impact's force essentially doubled because of all the rocks and dust kicked up during the collision, giving the asteroids an extra push.

Why This Inspires

This achievement represents humanity's growing ability to protect our home planet. We're no longer helpless against threats from space. We've proven we can move celestial objects weighing millions of tons using relatively simple technology.

The research also helps scientists understand how binary asteroids form by calculating each asteroid's mass and density separately for the first time. Later this year, the European Space Agency's Hera mission will visit the impact site to study the collision crater and gather even more data.

What started as a test has become a milestone in human capability. We're now a species that can gently guide the cosmos, not just observe it from afar.