In 2022, a NASA spacecraft slammed into a distant asteroid and knocked it into a new orbit — the first time we had ever deliberately changed the path of another world, a rehearsal for the day a real one comes for us

In 2022, a NASA spacecraft slammed into a distant asteroid and knocked it into a new orbit — the first time we had ever deliberately changed the path of another world, a rehearsal for the day a real one comes for us

Humanity’s first deliberate act of interplanetary vandalism was over before the pictures finished arriving. On 26 September 2022, a spacecraft roughly the size of a refrigerator flew into a 150-metre heap of rubble called Dimorphos at about six kilometres per second. The last image it sent back is a partial frame, grey gravel filling the view, cut off mid-transmission because the camera had ceased to exist. Dimorphos was never a threat to anyone…