The success of a recent NASA mission is pretty out of this world.

The DART mission marks the first time that humanity changed the motion of a celestial body with a spacecraft.

It was expected to be a huge success if it only slowed the orbit of an asteroid by about 10 minutes, but it actually slowed it by 32 minutes.

The spacecraft's impact not only shortened the asteroid's orbit, it changed its trajectory completely.

The results from the mission imply this technique could be used to deflect a future asteroid that poses a direct threat to Earth.