Just out in this week’s Science Advances (6 Mar 2026, vol. 12 #10):
Makadia, R. Chesley, S. R. Herald, D. et al. Direct detection of an asteroid’s heliocentric deflection: The Didymos system after DART .aea4259
Yes, that DART mission struck the asteroid (Dimorphos) good and hard. The goal of the impact was to alter Dimorphos’ orbit around its larger, primary asteroid, Didymos. That it did. But what it also did was to change the Didymos-Dimorphos orbit around the Sun- its “heliocentric” orbit.
Makadia et al. observed the Didymos pair closely, including occultations- times when the asteroids passed in front of a background star, causing the star to wink out. By carefully reducing the data from multiple sources, they found that, yes, the DART spacecraft did not merely reshape the orbit of Didymos. It actually deflected the pair a tiny amount relative to the greater Solar System. There are, now, two demonstrations of asteroid deflection. Should a binary asteroid like these two be a threat to the Earth, then striking one of them is now a viable defense against both of them.