How altering an asteroid's path today could save Earth tomorrow

The impact is scheduled for the next time it is close to Earth, in late September or early October 2022

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART mission, which launched on November 24, plans to do something simple in essence and ambitious in scale. It intends to crash a small object into a much larger object at a very high velocity, and to measure how much the crash alters the movement of the larger object.

The DART impactor spacecraft is about 2 cubic metres in size (ignoring its solar array, which has a much greater wingspan). It massed about 610 kg at launch, and will be about 550 kg at impact. Its ion engine will accelerate it to a speed