A multibillion-dollar spacecraft will collide head-on with an asteroid the size of a football stadium in an unprecedented large-scale planetary defense test Monday evening by the US space agency Nasa.
The 570 kg (1257 lb) spacecraft named Dart, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was scheduled to crash into the Dimorphos asteroid at high speed and self-destruct around 7:00 PM ET.
The collision between the asteroid and the spacecraft, which is about the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, is expected to unfold about 6.8 m miles (11 m km) from the earth.
The test aims to determine whether intentionally crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is an effective way to change its course and avoid a doomsday scenario for Earth. A relatively similar strategy involving a nuclear missile instead of an unmanned spacecraft failed during a key plot point in Morgan Freeman’s fictional 1998 planetary disaster film Deep Impact.
Dart’s planned self-destruction poses no threat to humanity, NASA spokesman Glen Nagle said.
Nagle said Monday’s test was the first in a series of “planetary protection missions.”
“We want to have a better chance than the dinosaurs did 65 million years ago,” Nagle said, referring to the theory that the prehistoric reptiles that ruled the Earth died out when an asteroid hit the planet.
Nagle added: “All they could do is look up and say ‘Oh asteroid’.”
Although no known asteroids larger than 140 meters (459 feet) in size have a significant chance of hitting Earth within the next century, only an estimated 40% of such asteroids have been identified so far.
Cameras and telescopes will observe the crash, but it will take days or even weeks to figure out whether it actually altered the asteroid’s orbit.
The $325 million planetary defense test that culminated Monday began with Dart’s launch last fall.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting.