In September 2022 a NASA spacecraft deliberately crashed into a harmless asteroid 11 million kilometres away and shifted its orbit by about 32 minutes — the first time humans had ever moved another world, the moment planetary defence stopped being theory and became something we have actually done.

On 26 September 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft struck Dimorphos, a roughly 150-metre moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos, about 11 million kilometres from Earth. The roughly 600-kilogram spacecraft hit at about 6 kilometres per second and shortened the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos. It was the first time anyone had deliberately changed the [...] The post In September 2022 a NASA spacecraft deliberately crashed into a harmless asteroid 11 million kilometres awa