WATCH LIVE: Moments away from NASA asteroid redirection.
NASA's DART spacecraft launches on mission to intentionally smash into asteroid
On Monday evening, DART is set to slam Dimorphos head-on at 14,000 mph. The impact should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock — demonstrating that if a killer asteroid ever heads our way, we’d stand a fighting chance of diverting it. "Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid," said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which is helping to manage the effort.
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