It's only in the last 50 minutes or so that Dart will be able to distinguish its target from 780m-wide Didymos. Hitting Dimorphos will be quite the challenge. "This is the sort of thing, if you needed to, that you would do years in advance to just give the asteroid a small nudge to change its future position so that the Earth and the asteroid wouldn't be on a collision course," she told BBC News. "Dart is the first planetary defence test mission to demonstrate running a spacecraft into an asteroid to move the position of that asteroid ever so slightly in space," explained Dr Nancy Chabot from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which leads the mission for Nasa. Nasa is promising some spectacular images from the 570kg-Dart probe as it goes in for the hit. This should change its orbit around a much larger asteroid, called Didymos, by just a few minutes every day. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission will check out this theory with a near-head-on crash into 160m-wide Dimorphos at over 20,000km/h. The thinking is you would only need to change the rock's velocity by a small amount to alter its path so that it misses Earth - provided you do it far enough in advance. Its idea is simply to smash a spacecraft into one. But how do you protect Earth from a killer asteroid for real? We've all seen how Hollywood would do it, with brave astronauts and nuclear weapons. Telescopes will be watching from afar, including the new super space observatory James Webb. The impact is timed for 23:14 GMT, Monday (12:14pm NZ time, Tuesday). The agency says the rock is not currently on a path to hit Earth, nor will the test accidentally send it in our direction. The demonstration is taking place some 11 million km away on a target called Dimorphos. Nasa's Dart mission wants to see how difficult it would be to stop a sizeable space rock from hitting Earth. In the coming hours, the American space agency will crash a probe into an asteroid. This artist's illustration shows the DART spacecraft from behind prior to impact at the Didymos binary system.
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