Bam! NASA spacecraft crashes into an asteroid

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A NASA spacecraft rammed into an asteroid at blistering speed on Monday in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth.

The galactic slam occurred on a harmless asteroid 11.3 million kilometers away, with the spacecraft named Dart plowing into the space rock at 22,500 km per hour. Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space, and most importantly, alter the asteroid's orbit.

"We have (an) impact!" Mission Control's Elena Adams announced, jumping up and down and thrusting her arms skyward.

Telescopes around the world and in space aimed at the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. Though the impact was immediately obvious, it will take as long as a couple of months to determine how much the asteroid's path was changed as Dart's radio signal abruptly ceased.

The $325 million mission was the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.

"As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success," Adams later told a news conference, as the room filled with applause. "I think Earthlings should sleep better. Definitely, I will."

Monday's target was a 160-meter asteroid named Dimorphos. It is a moonlet of Didymos, a fast-spinning asteroid five times bigger, which flung off material that formed the junior partner.

The pair have been orbiting the sun for eons without threatening Earth, making them ideal save-the-world test candidates.

Launched last November, the vending machine-sized Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — navigated to its target using new technology developed by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft builder and mission manager.

B612 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, has been pushing for impact tests like Dart since its founding by astronauts and physicists 20 years ago. Ed Lu, the foundation's executive director and a former astronaut, warned that the world must do a better job of identifying the countless space rocks lurking out there, Monday's feat aside.

"That's still the name of the game here," he said. "That's the thing that has to happen in order to protect the Earth."

Agencies Via Xinhua