There was an asteroid, but it wasn’t threatening the Earth. And there was a spacecraft, relying solely on sophisticated technology. The human heroes of the mission were actually at a physics and engineering lab between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

And there was a collision. In this case it was the final act of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, a spacecraft that launched in November and then raced around the sun for 10 months as it pursued its target — a small space rock, Dimorphos, seven million miles from Earth.

“For the first time, humanity has demonstrated the ability to autonomously target and alter the orbit of a celestial object,” Ralph Semmel, director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said during a news conference after the crash. The laboratory managed the mission for NASA.

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