By Jonathan Amos for BBCPhoto: AFP / NASA / Johns Hopkins APLIn the coming hours, the American space agency will crash a probe into an asteroid. Nasa's Dart mission wants to see how difficult it would be to stop a sizeable space rock from hitting Earth. Its idea is simply to smash a spacecraft into one. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission will check out this theory with a near-head-on crash into 160m-wide Dimorphos at over 20,000km/h. This should change its orbit around a much larger asteroid, called Didymos, by just a few minutes every day.

Source: Stuff September 27, 2022 00:55 UTC