Crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to save Earth sounds like a movie plot, but NASA’s DART is a very real test of the tech to do it — and it hits today.
As dramatic livestreams go, NASA’s latest has the potential to be seriously explosive. Tonight, the U.S. space agency will be broadcasting the incredible culmination of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) from 6pm EST. Over the course of the test, viewers will (hopefully) get to watch NASA slam a big rocket into an asteroid at 14,400 miles per hour.
The test is to determine the feasibility of knocking an asteroid off course if one ever gets too close for comfort. DART costs $330 million but that’s a small price to pay if an asteroid is actively threatening humanity. For comparison, that’s roughly 33,000 times the value of a 1968 Dodge Dart GT coupe. Built by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab — the asteroid redirector, not the car — DART was given its one-way ticket to the wild blue yonder on a SpaceX rocket last fall.
