PORTLAND (WGME) – NASA successfully crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on Monday.
Although it's been done in movies, this was the first time it's ever happened in real life.
A man with roots in Maine was directly involved in the project.
Mark Jensenius graduated from Greely High School in 2000.
His role in the test was the "DART Mission Smart Nav Guidance Engineer."
He says the "Smart Nav System" helped find the asteroid and then guide the spacecraft to it.
The asteroid wasn't at risk of impacting Earth, but the test shows how to protect the planet from a potential threat in the future.
"Right now, the team that developed Smart Nav is actually looking at all of the data we got back from the space craft, because we want to learn as much as we can about this real-world activity and possibly even refine the design so that in the future if it is needed to be called upon, that it's even better than it was on Monday," Jensenius said.
He says they won't have a final answer about the success of the mission for a few weeks.
At a minimum, he says they made "a really big bang."