<span style="color: #222222;">US space agency – NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos at breakneck speed last night. The target was Dimorphos, a 160-metre-tall asteroid. DART slammed into the harmless asteroid 9.6 million kilometres away at 22,500 kilometres per hour.<br />”<br />”The DART mission intentionally crashed on an asteroid to test a unique defence technology. The crash is aimed at giving Earth a defence tool against future asteroids headed our way. The 325 million dollar project was the first attempt to move a natural object in space but it will take days or perhaps weeks to assess how much the asteroid's path was altered.<br />”<br />”The DART, a vending machine-sized spacecraft that was launched in November, used novel navigational techniques created by the mission manager and spacecraft builder, Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory.&nbsp;</span><br />