NASA is a taking page out of the action flick “Armageddon” – by launching a spaceship to wallop an asteroid’s moon in a test to deflect a space rock threatening our planet.
The space agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is set to lift off at 1:20 a.m. EST on Nov. 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The planetary defense mission is anticipated to make impact between Sept. 26 and Oct. 2, 2022 – striking its target at nearly 15,000 mph, 6.8 million miles away from Earth, officials said.
Live coverage of the launch will be shown on NASA TV, the agency’s app and its website.
“DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an asteroid in space to change its motion,” NASA said.
“Its target is the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet,” it added.
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