NEW YORK, United States - Four years ago, NASA purposely smashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid to see if they could deflect it -- a test to prove humanity could protect Earth from threatening space rocks.

NASA's DART mission didn’t just change the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid it hit. It changed the orbit of the larger Didymos around the sun.

NASA will host a news conference at 3 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 12, at Kennedy Space Center to highlight progress toward the Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight of the Artemis program, which is intended to carry astronauts around the Moon.

An unannounced test of NASA's towering Space Launch System rocket uncovered another issue with the vehicle meant to soon launch astronauts on a mission around the moon. Ground crews at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida partially fueled the 322-foot ...

NASA's DART mission launched from California changed not just the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid it hit, but the larger Didymos' path around the sun.

In September 2022, a spacecraft the size of a refrigerator slammed into a small asteroid at nearly 24,000 kilometers per hour (15,000 miles per hour). The collision was deliberate and the asteroid posed no threat of collision with Earth or the moon.