NASA took aim at an asteroid last month, and on Tuesday, the space agency announced that its planned 14,000-mile-per-hour collision with an object named Dimorphos made even more of a bull’s-eye shot than expected.

That winning strike was the first of its kind. “We conducted humanity’s first planetary defense test,” said Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, during a news conference, “and we showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet.”

 

Image above: An image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on Oct. 8 showed a tail of debris blasted from the surface of Dimorphos 285 hours after the collision with the DART spacecraft.Credit…NASA/ESA/STScI/Hubble