Now NASA is waiting for measurements and, if they show that the course of the asteroid has changed even slightly, they will recognize the mission as a success.
“In case you keep score: humanity is 1, asteroids are 0,” NASA spokeswoman Tahira Allen said during a live broadcast immediately after the impact.
It will be weeks before astronomers know if the impact has done its job.
By the way, the camera aboard the DART spacecraft took a close-up of the asteroid a few minutes before the impact.
NASA joked that the dinosaurs, supposedly extinct after the Earth collided with an asteroid 65 million years ago, did not have a space program, but the current inhabitants of the Earth have one. The probe, about the size of a golf cart and weighing 570 kg, crashed into the asteroid Dimorph at a speed of about 22,530 km/h.
