We’re about to witness a world first – or, more accurately, an out-of-this-world first. In the coming hours, NASA’s DART mission will attempt to do something unprecedented: deliberately alter the course of a significantly sized body in our Solar System.

In simpler terms, the mission brief is to smash into an asteroid on purpose. And, as Steven Tingay explains, that feat would provide an important test of our ability to avert a planetary disaster by deflecting any future asteroids that end up heading towards Earth.

The target for this interplanetary trick shot is an asteroid called Dimorphos, 11 million kilometres from Earth. The DART probe will lock itself onto a collision course and then fly into the 160-metre-wide rock at 24,000km per hour. As if that weren’t clever enough, scientists will then check it worked by studying the effect on Dimorphos’s bigger sibling, Didymos.

Choosing a ‘binary system’ of asteroids that orbit one another gives astronomers a handy way to assess the result of the impact – if Didymos is successfully knocked off course, they should be able to detect changes in the sunlight reflected off the pair. Another reason for choosing these particular asteroids is precisely because they pose no danger to Earth. Remember, this is just a drill.

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