The blast-off was shown live on Nasa TV and on the SpaceX Twitter account. NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a harmless asteroid through the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, better known as DART, on Sept. The team behind Dart chose the Didymos system because its relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make it ideal for observing the results of the impact. But scientists say smaller asteroids are far more common and pose a greater theoretical danger in the near term. Dart scored basically a bullseye on the asteroid about 6.8m miles from Earth when it crashed head-on at 7.14pm EDT, Dart deputy program manager Elena Adams said at a post-mission press.

The asteroid being targeted by Dart poses no actual threat and is tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth 66m years ago, leading to extinction of the dinosaurs. Cameras mounted on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft to be released from Dart about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images of it back to Earth. Once there Dart will test its ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic force. NASA's 1,376-pound probe traveled about 6.8 million miles before crashing into the asteroid, as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The Dart payload, about the size of a small car, was released from the booster minutes after launch to begin its 10-month journey into deep space, some 6.8 million miles (11 km) from Earth. (Image credit: SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, STScI, Jian-Yang Li. If the mission is successful, it will mean that Nasa and other space agencies could deflect an asteroid heading towards Earth and avert an Armageddon-style impact. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the dust plume generated by NASAs DART probe smashing into the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022. The plan is to crash the robot spacecraft into the moonlet Dimorphos at 15,000mph (24,100km/h) and change its path by a fraction.

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