Smashing success: NASA asteroid strike results in big nudgeCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.It took consecutive nights of telescope observations from Chile and South Africa to determine how much the impact altered the path of the 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid around its companion, a much bigger space rock.Underground microbes may have swarmed ancient MarsSmacked asteroid's debris trail more than 6,000 miles longSpace telescopes capture asteroid slam with striking clarityNASA spacecraft buzzes Jupiter moon Europa, closest in yearsApollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, a co-founder of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, said he’s “clearly delighted, no question about that” by the results and the attention the mission has brought to asteroid deflection.“We really need to also have that warning time for a technique like this to be effective,” said mission leader Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft and managed the $325 million mission.Launched last year, the vending machine-size Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — was destroyed when it slammed into the asteroid 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) away at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph)."