Mission crash into ASTEROID! NASA launches its first ever 'planetary defense' mission as DART spacecraft dispatched on SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to deliberately smash into a space rock at 15,000 mph
NASA's first ever 'planetary defence' mission to deflect an asteroid 6.8 million miles from Earth has launched this morning.
The US space agency tweeted the news, writing: 'And… liftoff! The #DARTMission is now on a nearly one-year journey to crash into a distant asteroid as the world's first planetary defense test mission.'
Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a box-shaped space probe, launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 06:21 GMT on Wednesday (22:21 PST Tuesday) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, about 150 miles (240km) north-west of Los Angeles. SpaceX announced the probe separated from its Falcon 9 rocket at 2:19am ET, 55 minutes after launcg, starting its lone journey to the crash site 6.8 million miles away.
The $325m (£240m) DART mission will take 10 months to complete its almost seven million-mile journey into deep space, where it will then smash into the small asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, at 15,000mph (24,100km/h) in September 2022.
When the 1,210lb space probe hits Dimorphos, the plan is for it to change the speed of the 'moonlet' by a fraction of a per cent, echoing the plot for the Bruce Willis movie 'Armageddon'.
Although the 525ft-wide space rock doesn't pose a danger to Earth, NASA wants to measure the asteroid's altered orbit caused by the collision.
This demonstration of 'planetary defence' will inform future missions that could one day save Earth from a deadly asteroid impact. 
Lift off: NASA has launched a spacecraft on a mission to smash into an asteroid to test whether it would be possible to knock a speeding space rock off course if one were to threaten Earth
Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a box-shaped space probe, launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 06:21 GMT on Wednesday (22:21 PST Tuesday) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California
The $325m (£240m) DART mission will take 10 months to complete its almost seven million-mile journey into deep space
SpaceX announced the probe separated from its Falcon 9 rocket at 2:19am ET, 55 minutes after launcg, starting its lone journey to the crash site 6.8 million miles away
'This isn't going to destroy the asteroid. It's just going to give it a small nudge,' said mission official Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the project.
Dimorphos completes an orbit around Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes 'just like clockwork', she added.
The pair are no danger to Earth but offer scientists a way to measure the effectiveness of the collision.
DART's goal is a crash that will slow Dimorphos down and cause it to fall closer toward the bigger asteroid, shaving 10 minutes off its orbit.
The change in the orbital period will be measured by telescopes on Earth. The minimum change for the mission to be considered a success is 73 seconds.
The DART technique could prove useful for altering the course of an asteroid years or decades before it bears down on Earth with the potential for catastrophe.
A small nudge 'would add up to a big change in its future position, and then the asteroid and the Earth wouldn't be on a collision course,' NASA said.
Scientists constantly search for asteroids and plot their courses to determine whether they could hit the planet.
'Although there isn't a currently known asteroid that's on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,' said Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer.
'The key to planetary defence is finding them well before they are an impact threat.
'We don't want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed towards Earth and then have to test this capability.'
The target asteroid, Dimorphos, which means 'two forms' in Greek, is about 525ft in diameter and orbits around Didymos ('twin' in Greek).
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