Boulders flung from NASA's DART mission could crash into Mars, study predicts

NASA's asteroid-deflection mission may have sent dozens of boulders on a collision course with Mars, a new study suggests.

In 2022, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos in order to change its orbit, as well the trajectory of the larger space rock it circles, called Didymos. The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), was designed as a kind of pilot program for deflecting potentially deadly near-Earth asteroids similar in size to the one that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs.

Scientists considered DART a huge success; subsequent studies revealed that it altered the smaller asteroid's orbit by 32 minutes, and totally changed Dimorphos' shape.

But the mission had an unexpected consequence: When the craft collided with Dimorphos, it sent a swarm of 37 boulders measuring up to 22 feet (6.7 meters)  flying into the cosmos.

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"We did not expect that many boulders that were that big to be blown off," Andy Riven, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and a member of the DART team, told National Geographic.

Thankfully, none of the boulders seem poised to strike Earth, but researchers were still curious where the giant rocks might end up. Now, they may have an answer. In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed preprint paper, researchers describe the debris' potential destination: Mars.