NASA spacecraft are positioned to collide with an asteroid

• The impact is scheduled for Monday at 23:14 GMT (00:14 BST, Tuesday).
• Dart won’t be able to tell its target apart from Didymos until the last 50 minutes or so.
• The spacecraft’s trajectory must then be modified by navigational software for a direct strike.

The American space agency is about to send a spacecraft hurtling toward an asteroid. The goal of NASA’s Dart mission is to assess how challenging it would be to prevent a sizable space rock from colliding with Earth.

On a target dubbed Dimorphos, the demonstration is occurring some 11 million kilometres (7 million miles) distant.

According to the agency, neither the test nor the rock’s current trajectory puts it on a course to strike the Earth.

The impact is scheduled for Monday at 23:14 GMT (00:14 BST, Tuesday). The new James Webb super space observatory will be one of the telescopes keeping an eye on things from a distance.

Everyone is aware of the Hollywood approach, which involves fearless astronauts and nuclear weapons. But how exactly can Earth be safeguarded against a deadly asteroid?

NASA will soon find out. Its plan is to just collide two spacecraft.

According to the theory, you could shift the rock’s trajectory to avoid hitting Earth by slightly modifying its velocity, assuming you did so far enough in advance.

With a nearly head-on collision into the 160-meter-wide Dimorphos at a speed of almost 20,000 kilometres per hour, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will test this notion.

This should cause a small daily change in its orbit around the much bigger asteroid Didymos.

The 570kg-Dart probe is expected to take some amazing pictures as it approaches its target, according to NASA.

Dart is the first planetary defence test mission to show crashing a spaceship into an asteroid can modestly shift the asteroid’s position in space, according to Dr Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the mission’s main organisation.

She told the press that if necessary, “this is the kind of thing you would do years in advance to just give the asteroid a slight shove to adjust its future location so that the Earth and the asteroid wouldn’t be on a collision course.”

Dimorphos will be very difficult to hit. Dart won’t be able to tell its target apart from Didymos until the last 50 minutes or so.

The spacecraft’s trajectory must then be modified by navigational software for a direct strike.

“It just isn’t possible for there to be a pilot sitting on the ground with a stick operating the spacecraft due to the speed of light and the distances involved. Simply put, there is not enough time to respond “explained Dr Tom Statler, a scientist for NASA’s Dart programme.

We had to create software that could decipher the photos captured by the spacecraft, identify the proper target, and perform thruster-fired course correction manoeuvres.

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