NASA asteroid mission could completely deform small moonlet, simulation suggests

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor can severely deform the small asteroid it will collide with, a new simulation suggests. It was earlier thought that the DART impactor would leave behind a crater.

The DART impactor is an ambitious mission to test the viability of using a kinetic impactor to deflect an asteroid heading toward Earth. (In this case, kinetic impactor means slamming a spacecraft into the rock.) NASA…