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Although no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalogue of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation1,2. Several approaches have been proposed to potentially prevent an asteroid impact with Earth by deflecting or disrupting an asteroid1–3. A test of kinetic impact technology was identified as the highest-priority space mission related to asteroid mitigation1. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is a full-scale test of kinetic impact technology. The mission’s target asteroid was Dimorphos, the secondary member of the S-type binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. This binary asteroid system was chosen to enable ground-based telescopes to quantify the asteroid deflection caused by the impact of the DART spacecraft4. Although past missions have utilized impactors to investigate the properties of small bodies5,6, those earlier missions were not intended to deflect their targets and did not achieve measurable deflections. Here we report the DART spacecraft’s autonomous kinetic impact into Dimorphos and reconstruct the impact event, including the timeline leading to impact, the location and nature of the DART impact site, and the size and shape of Dimorphos. The successful impact of the DART spacecraft with Dimorphos and the resulting change in the orbit of Dimorphos7 demonstrates that kinetic impactor technology is a viable technique to potentially defend Earth if necessary.

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Social insects have long served as inspiration to the multi-agent community. In this paper, we take the opposite approach and see if tools from decentralized, networked control can be used to predict observed, biological behaviors. In particular, we study the silkworm moth, the Bombyx Mori, and we model these moths as first-order networks in which the malemale interactions are defined through a proximity graph. The male-female interactions are given by a broadcast protocol in which the females that are releasing pheromones are visible to all the males. Using barrier certificates, the resulting, switched network is analyzed and it is shown that the males are attracted to and trapped in a region defined by the female moths, as is the case in actual silkworm moths as well.