'DART' Mission: NASA spacecraft to crash into asteroid to avert doomsday

Dart Launch

NASA is testing a new planetary defense system designed to knock an asteroid from a potential collision on Earth.

But there's no need to panic, this one isn't headed for earth. They are doing that to basically test the technique to save the planet if there was ever killer asteroid coming towards earth.

At this point you might be thinking of Hollywood movies like Armageddon where astronauts drill into an asteroid and plant a bomb or Deep Impact where the president orders a nuclear. But the technique in this mission will be a little less dramatic. 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a spacecraft has blasted off from California on a mission to smash a robot spacecraft into an asteroid. 

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART will examine NASA's ability to alter an asteroid's trajectory with kinetic force. The mission is to basically go hit an asteroid and see if it can be moved.

The DART technique could prove useful for the altering course of an asteroid years or decades before it heads towards our planet.

The spacecraft will crash into a 170 meter wide asteroid called Dimorphous which is orbiting a larger rock.

It will take 10 months for the spacecraft to reach its destination. The plan is for it to slam head-on into Dimorphous in September 2022.

If all goes well in September 2022 it will slam at 24,000 kilometers per hour into Dimorphous.

The mission is now being billed as humanity's first asteroid deflection test mission. It is hoped that the test might one day save earth from an incoming rock from space.  

The goal of this mission is a crash that will slow down the asteroid and scientists hope that the impact will change the speed of its orbit around its main body by just a fraction of 1%, enough to alter its orbital period by several minutes. 

 The high speed smash up will occur around 11 million kilometers away and within full view of the earth's ground telescopes. Scientists constantly search for asteroids and plot their courses to determine whether they could hit the planet.