What is the DART Mission?

About Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission:

• NASA’s DART mission was a spacecraft designed to test a method of deflecting an asteroid for planetary defense, using the “kinetic impactor” technique (in simplest terms means smashing a thing into another thing).
• DART was the first-ever space mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by kinetic impactor.
• The target of the spacecraft was a 160-meter-wide asteroid known as Dimorphos, which is a moonlet in orbit around the larger asteroid, Didymos.
• It was launched in November 2021.
• DART spacecraft successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022, altering the asteroid’s orbit by 33 minutes.
• It is the first time humanity intentionally changed the motion of a celestial object in space.

Q1) What is an Asteroid?

Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun. Although asteroids orbit the Sun like planets, they are much smaller than planets.There are lots of asteroids in our solar system. Most of them live in the main asteroid belt—a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Source: Results of DART planetary defence test to deflect asteroid published