A Nasa spacecraft has crashed into a small astroid millions of miles away and shifted its orbit in a 'watershed moment' for planetary defence.
With somewhere around 27,000 astroids orbiting near earth, scientists are working on ways to deflect any heading directly for Earth.
Dimorphos is 170-meters wide, is part of a binary asteroid system and orbits Didymos, taking around 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete the circuit - before the collision that is. In a live question-and-answer session after the crash, senior leaders from Nasa and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory said the mission was “straight down the middle” and nothing went wrong.
The asteroids were around 6.8 million miles from Earth at the time of the collision, which was recorded by a briefcase-sized satellite known as the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids .
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