DART Mission- Purpose, Significance & Results

What is the DART Mission?

• DART or Double Asteroid Redirection Test is a planetary defence mission launched by NASA in November 2021.
• It was launched from Vandenberg Base in California, USA, on-board a Falcon rocket.
• Its target is a binary asteroid system i.e. a pair of asteroids that orbits the sun together. The particular target of this mission is Dimorphos, a 160 m wide asteroid that orbits the larger Didymos. This pair is 11.2 million km away from earth.

What is the mission’s purpose?

• It is a mission to test the ‘kinetic impactor technique’ or the ‘kick method’ tha