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TechCrunch
Watch the asteroid-smashing DART spacecraft make its 6-million-mile shot today
One of NASA’s biggest crowd-pleasers in years is about to reach its denouement: If all goes well, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft (or rather guided anti-space-rock missile) will impact its target at around 14,700 miles per hour. DART was launched last November and has spent the intervening months positioning itself for a perfect shot on Dimorphos, a 525-foot-wide asteroid in orbit around Didymos, which is half-a-mile wide (and more the type of object we’d need to worry about, planetarily speaking). DART itself will smack straight into Dimorphos, not to annihilate it or send it careening back out of the solar system but just to affect its orbit enough that researchers back here on Earth can tell whether this technique would actually work in an emergency.
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