On Sept. 26, 2022, at precisely 6:14 p.m. ET, a box-shaped spacecraft no bigger than a loveseat smashed directly into an asteroid wider than a football field. The planned impact knocked the space rock off its orbit, showing for the first time that an asteroid can potentially be deflected away from Earth. The spacecraft was the key part of DART, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which aimed to redirect the paths of Dimorphos and Didymos — two small, nearby asteroids that orbit as a pair. (Neither asteroid has ever…
