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Loading contentA spacecraft (or a released projectile) that deliberately strikes a small body — to excavate subsurface material (Deep Impact) or to deflect it (DART).
Deliberately striking a target body to excavate material or change its orbit.
A NASA Discovery mission that released a 370 kg impactor into the path of comet 9P/Tempel 1 in 2005, excavating material from below the surface while the flyby spacecraft observed the impact — the first look inside a comet.
JAXA's follow-up to Hayabusa — a far more capable mission to the carbonaceous asteroid Ryugu. It deployed rovers and a lander, fired a projectile to make an artificial crater and sample subsurface material, and returned 5.4 grams of pristine, water- and organic-bearing rock. The spacecraft is now on an extended mission to a small fast-rotating asteroid.
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test — the first full-scale planetary-defense demonstration. The spacecraft deliberately crashed into Dimorphos, the small moon of asteroid Didymos, in 2022, measurably shortening its orbit and proving that a kinetic impactor can deflect an asteroid.
An early-2000s ESA planetary-defense concept — a two-spacecraft study in which an impactor (Hidalgo) would strike an asteroid while an orbiter (Sancho) measured the deflection. It was never built, but it prefigured the AIDA/DART–Hera approach.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.