NASA’s first ever ‘planetary defence’ mission to deflect an asteroid 6.8 million miles from Earth is set to launch this week.
Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a box-shaped space probe, will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 22:20 PT on Tuesday, November 23 (Wednesday 06:20am GMT) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Following its 6.8 million-mile journey, DART will smash into the small asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, at 13,500 miles per hour