In 2022, scientists from NASA sent a spacecraft called DART to crash into a small asteroid moon named Dimorphos.
Why would they crash a spacecraft on purpose?
To see if we could push an asteroid and change its path.

And it worked.
The crash caused Dimorphos to move slightly differently around its larger partner asteroid, Didymos.
Scientists later discovered that the impact even changed the asteroid system’s path around the Sun — just a tiny bit.
The change was extremely small, but it proved something important:
If an asteroid were ever heading toward Earth, we might be able to push it away before it hits us.

In short: Humans have successfully altered the motion of a celestial body in our solar system for the first time, proving we may have the technology to prevent a dinosaur-style extinction event in the future.
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