The Insane Engineering of the DART Mission

A 570 kilogram spacecraft the size of a refrigerator rammed into an asteroid at six kilometers per second.

The goal of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test was to redirect an asteroid with just enough force to change its trajectory by a marginal amount.

A change of just 1% could be enough to avoid a collision with Earth .

The mission is perhaps the most important experiment NASA has ever performed.

Asteroid hit by NASA 's Dart spacecraft in October .

The spacecraft was equipped with a camera attached to a small 20 centimeter wide telescope and circuitry no more powerful than that of a PlayStation One .

The asteroid was too far away to manually direct the spacecraft.

The next generation of ion thrusters were powered by new, specially developed lightweight solar cells that deploy from a roll called a Roll Out Solar Array.

Brilliant teachers with interesting and fun interactive courses that challenge you along the way.

They're adding content monthly so there's always something new to learn.