Space agency conducts Dart mission to learn whether asteroid’s trajectory can be diverted away from Earth

Six minutes to impact on what is one of Nasa’s coolest missions of recent history.

It has taken Dart 10 months and 470m miles to get here, since launch last year.

Usually Nasa spacecraft are intended to operate for many years, or even decades, but not Dart.

Dart was built to be destroyed. Dart is a mission of firsts, proving that a spacecraft can autonomously seek, find and approach a target in space that’s so far away we don’t even know what it looks like.

Bid to change asteroid’s course marks ‘new era of humankind’ as agency seeks to protect Earth from future disaster

A multimillion-dollar spacecraft collided head-on with an asteroid the size of a football stadium on Monday in an unprecedented test of Nasa’s capacity to defend Earth from a doomsday scenario.

Nasa’s craft successfully crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos 6.8m miles from Earth. The mission, known as Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), marked humanity’s first attempt at moving another celestial body, with the goal of seeing if a large asteroid hurtling toward our planet could be successfully diverted.