NASA announces its DART mission successfully shifted an asteroid’s orbit

A spacecraft that impacted the asteroid Dimorphos succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said when announcing the results of its DART mission.

NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (or “DART”) spacecraft into Dimorphos’ path two weeks ago to see if an asteroid could be “nudged” to prevent a collision with Earth. In a press release, NASA said: “Since DART’s intentional collision with Dimorphos on Sept. 26, astronomers have been using telescopes on Earth to measure how much that time has changed. Now, the investigation team has confirmed the spacecraft’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbit around [its larger parent asteroid] Didymos by 32 minutes, shortening the 11 hour and 55-minute orbit to 11 hours and 23 minutes.”

Speaking on the results, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the DART mission “shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” and called it a “watershed moment for planetary defense and all of humanity.”

See the charts and images of NASA’s findings here.

Prosecutors drop all charges against Adnan Syed after receiving DNA test results

Baltimore prosecutors yesterday dropped all charges against Adnan Syed, whose case was covered in the true-crime podcast Serial.

Syed served over two decades in prison after he was convicted in 2000 of the murder of Hae Min Lee. A judge overturned the conviction last month, and yesterday, all charges against Syed were dropped due to the results of touch DNA tests that were completed on Lee’s clothes for the first time. Per prosecutors, the tests uncovered multiple DNA samples on Lee’s shoes, none of which belonged to Syed. In a statement, Syed’s lawyer, Erica Suter, said that Syed “is innocent and lost 23 years of his life serving time for a crime he did not commit.”

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby apologized to both the Syed and Lee families during a press conference and said her office wouldn’t prosecute Syed a second time for Lee’s death.