This was the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in orbit.
At 7:14 p.m. EDT, the successful impact was announced by mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
The NASA DART mission was to target the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a tiny rock with a diameter of only 530 feet (160 meters)
The mission’s successful one-way flight demonstrated that NASA can steer a spacecraft to kinetically contact an asteroid in order to divert it.