The Science of the Dimorphos Crash

Dart is about twice the size of a standard football field and weighed an estimated 11 billion pounds. The fact that dart made a dent at all really comes down to its high velocity impact which we already said was about 14,000 miles per hour. NASA's official criterion for success was shifting dimorphous's orbit by just 73 seconds initial predictions were that maybe dart would nudge it off by about seven minutes Instead we got 33 33 minutes.