The test will provide vital information on how to stop catastrophic asteroid impacts.
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft is set to slam into an asteroid on Monday , in the first ever test of humanity's ability to deflect life-threatening space rocks before they collide with Earth.
DART began its journey to Didymos and Dimorphos 10 months ago, launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, but its roots can be traced back further. In the early 2000s, scientists at the European Space Agency proposed another asteroid-bumping test named after Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes' 16th-century literary knight renowned for charging pointlessly at windmills, which he mistook for giants.
"There will be an impact that will change the trajectory; there will be a crater formed; and after that there will be ejecta that will propagate through space, and LICIACube will photograph this," Stavro Ivanovski, a researcher at Italy's Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology and a member of the LICIACube team, said during a Sept. 19 news briefing.
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