The spacecraft will launch on Wednesday before hurtling into a space rock at 15,000 miles per hour in 2022 to test Earth's asteroid defences.
Altogether, the DART spacecraft weighs around 1,210 pounds and will be travelling at 4.1 miles per second when it smashes into its target.
The spacecraft's target is a pair of asteroids called Didymos. This pair is known as a binary asteroid system, with a smaller one orbiting a larger one. The DART spacecraft will aim to crash into the smaller one, known as Dimorphos, which has a diameter of 525 feet. Scientists will then use telescopes to see how the orbit of Dimorphos is affected by the collision. It should be noted that the Didymos pair do not pose a threat to Earth, and that DART is just a practice mission.now considered to be a genuine threatNASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies currently states there are more than 27,000 near-Earth asteroids that are. Currently none of them are thought to be likely to collide with our planet in the foreseeable future.
Yet impacts do happen. As recently as 2013, the Russian region of Chelyabinsk Oblast was shaken by an asteroid that entered our atmosphere at around 40,000 miles per hour and exploded mid-air, producing a shockwave powerful enough to smash glass over 200 square miles and injure more than 1,600 people, according to NASA. The asteroid is estimated to have been just 55 to 66 feet in size.
An artist's illustration of the DART spacecraft approaching its target. The mission will aim to alter an asteroid's path through space.
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