Humanity punched this asteroid! NASA shows how hard in numbers

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Potentially hazardous asteroids can pose a risk for planet Earth at any time. In order to avoid any kind of a dangerous situation and to deflect the direction of any asteroid nearing Earth, NASA had on September 26, 2022 launched Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft which deliberately smashed into an asteroid called Asteroid Dimorphos leading to successfully altering its trajectory. The primary objective of DART was to test NASA's ability to alter the asteroid's direction. Asteroid Dimorphos orbits around another asteroid called Didymos. The separation between the centers of the two asteroids is 1.18 kilometers (0.73 miles), says Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Data from this mission will help inform researchers how to potentially divert a threatening asteroid's path away from Earth, if ever necessary. The DART experiment also provided fresh insights into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early solar system.

So, if you are wondering what happened after the collision, then know that scientists have just revealed the same.

According to a report by Nature, "The impact caused the asteroid's orbit around another space rock to shrink — Dimorphos now completes an orbit 33 minutes faster than before the impact."

The report further added, "now, five studies in Nature describe the final moments of the crash and how it affected the asteroid. One group combined data on the spacecraft's trajectory with photographs of the asteroid's surface just before impact. As DART hurtled towards Dimorphos at more than 6 kilometres per second, the first part that hit was one of its solar panels, which smashed into a 6.5-metre-wide boulder. Microseconds later, the main body of the spacecraft