NASA's dramatic DART mission aims to deflect an asteroid off course as a planetary defense test.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test will be the first mission to test planetary defense technology in space., the DART spacecraft will impact its target asteroid, Dimorphos, at 7:14 p.m. EDT on Monday, September 26. And the event will be live streamed for all to see.
While Dimorphos poses no danger to Earth, the test will allow NASA to assess whether a spacecraft impact can be used to alter the trajectory of a hypothetical hazardous asteroid on a collision course with Earth.NASA is known to livestream key moments of its big missions — it did so for the first flight of its Ingenuity Mars helicopter, and it will do the same for the upcoming launch of its moon-bound Artemis I mission, currently slated for Monday, August 29.
If all goes to plan, the space agency says the DART mission will "show a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it to change the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be measured using ground-based telescopes." The mission will provide "important data to help better prepare for an asteroid that might pose an impact hazard to Earth, should one ever be discovered.
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