On Monday evening, a robotic Nasa spacecraft is programmed to ram itself into a distant asteroid at 14,000 miles per hour (25,500 kilometers per hour) in deep space to demonstrate the agency’s future ability to defend Earth from hazardous space rocks.
The scene will play out nearly 7 million miles from Earth.
Dimorphos, measuring about 525 feet (160 meters), is part of a two asteroid system, thus the DART name, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
As soon as DART’s task is complete, astronomers using radar and optical telescopes will get to work observing the asteroids from Earth.
Nasa said it would share footage of the impact in the days after the collision.
DART is just testing one way in which Nasa or another space agency could try to defend Earth from asteroids.
“This demonstration will start to add tools to our toolbox of methods that could be used in the future,” Lindley Johnson, Nasa’s planetary defense officer, said.
“And we need several of them because the circumstances that we might face could be quite different.”.