On Tuesday, November 23 at 10:21 p.m. PST, Falcon 9 launched NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission to an interplanetary transfer orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. DART is humanity’s first planetary defense test mission to see if intentionally crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is an effective way to change its course, should an Earththreatening asteroid be discovered in the future. This was SpaceX’s first interplanetary mission.

This was the third flight for this Falcon 9’s first stage booster, which previously supported launch of Sentinel6 Michael Freilich and a Starlink mission.