Free Republic

AP SCIENCE WRITER LOS ANGELES -- A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target, according to a summary of the investigation released Monday. Investigators blamed the collision on faulty navigational data that caused the DART spacecraft to believe that it was backing away from its target when it was actually bearing down on it. "The inaccurate perception of its distance and speed ... prevented DART from taking effective action to avoid a collision," the summary said. The 800-pound Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology spacecraft was supposed to rendezvous with a defunct Pentagon...