NASA on Monday conducted the first ever mission to intentionally crash a spacecraft into an asteroid.

Watch the video above to see what Elizabeth Gabeler, who was on the team that helped design the Dart spacecraft, had to say about it

The mission was part of a long-term goal of being ready to handle the threat — while not imminent or likely — of a large asteroid hitting Earth. The $325 million mission was the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.

The galactic grand slam occurred at a harmless asteroid 7 million miles away, with the spacecraft named Dart plowing into the small space rock at 14,000 mph. Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit.

Monday’s target: a 525-foot asteroid named Dimorphos. It’s actually a moonlet of Didymos, Greek for twin, a fast-spinning asteroid five times bigger that flung off the material that formed the junior partner.

The pair have been orbiting the sun for eons without threatening Earth, making them ideal save-the-world test candidates.

Launched last November, the vending machine-size Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — navigated to its target using new technology developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft builder and mission manager.

Dart’s on-board camera, a key part of this smart navigation system, caught sight of Dimorphos barely an hour before impact.

When NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft slammed into the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, the impact certainly left a mark.

The intentional collision, which took place Sept. 26 as a test of asteroid deflection technology, displaced more than 2 million pounds of rocks and dust from the asteroid into space. Scientists estimate it was enough material to fill about six or seven rail cars.

The insights gained from the collision are helping scientists learn how this planetary defense technique might be used in the future. That's if an asteroid is ever discovered to be on a collision course with Earth.

Neither Dimorphos, nor the larger asteroid Didymos that it orbits, pose a threat to Earth, but the system made for excellent target practice.

New findings and images from the impact were shared Thursday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Chicago.

"What we can learn from the DART mission is all part of a NASA's overarching work to understand asteroids and other small bodies in our Solar System," said Tom Statler, program scientist for DART at NASA, in a statement.

"Impacting the asteroid was just the start. Now we use the observations to study what these bodies are made of and how they were formed — as well as how to defend our planet should there ever be an asteroid headed our way."

Images captured by space and ground-based telescopes before and after the impact are helping scientists piece together what happened when the spacecraft crashed into Dimorphos at about 14,000 miles per hour.

The DART team calculated that the transfer of momentum when the spacecraft hit the asteroid was 3.6 times greater than if the asteroid had absorbed the spacecraft and no material was blasted from the surface. The momentum created when Dimorphos' surface material blasted out into space contributed to moving the asteroid more than the spacecraft did, the researchers said.

"Momentum transfer is one of the most important things we can measure, because it is information we would need to develop an impactor mission to divert a threating asteroid," said Andy Cheng, DART investigation team lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, in a statement.

"Understanding how a spacecraft impact will change an asteroid's momentum is key to designing a mitigation strategy for a planetary defense scenario."

The DART mission successfully changed the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorphos, marking the first time humanity intentionally changed the motion of a celestial object in space.

Prior to impact, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit Didymos. Now, it takes Dimorphos 11 hours and 23 minutes to circle Didymos. The DART spacecraft changed the moonlet asteroid's orbit by 32 minutes.

Initially, astronomers expected DART to be a success if it shortened the trajectory by 10 minutes.

For the first time since 2011, NASA astronauts will launch into space from U.S. soil.

NASA and Elon Musk's space company SpaceX are looking to launch Demo-2 on May 27,

NBC News reported.

According to SpaceX

, this will be the second demo mission for their Crew Dragon, which will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will fly the spacecraft, SpaceX announced.

CNBC's space reporter Michael Sheetz said the plan is for Behnken and Hurley to spend two to three months in space.

"In January 2020, SpaceX demonstrated Crew Dragon's in-flight launch escape capability to reliably carry crew to safety in the unlikely event of an emergency on the launch pad or at any point during ascent," SpaceX officials said in a statement. "SpaceX has completed over 700 tests of the spacecraft's SuperDraco engines, which fired together at full throttle can power Dragon 0.5 miles away from Falcon 9 in 7.5 seconds, accelerating the vehicle more than 400 mph."

SpaceX said they've also completed 26 tests on the crew's Mark 3 parachutes.