NASA Team in Alabama Receives Top Federal Award for Successful Asteroid Deflection Mission

NASA employees Brian Key and Scott Bellamy have been awarded the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal for their work on the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The DART mission successfully impacted an asteroid in September 2022, altering its orbit and demonstrating a planetary defense method. Key and Bellamy served as program manager and mission manager, respectively, and were honored in the Science, Technology, and Environment category. The DART mission will be followed by the Hera mission in 2024 to further assess its impact, and NASA is also developing the NEO Surveyor mission to discover potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.