Five things to know about NASA’s mission to hit an asteroid - The Hill

On Monday, NASA plans to strike an asteroid about 7 million miles from Earth with a 1,000-pound spacecraft in an unprecedented planetary defense test.

If successful, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will be the first-ever spacecraft to deflect an asteroid with a kinetic strike and adjust its speed and flight path.

No known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to impact Earth in the next 100 years, but scientists have only found about 40 percent of those asteroids as of October 2021, according to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL), a partner in the DART mission.

The spacecraft weighs 1,345 pounds but consists of just one instrument: the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation system, known as DRACO, which will capture images of Dimorphos and its asteroid system.

Technically, Dimorphos is a moonlet of Didymos, a larger asteroid that Dimorphous orbits in the system.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will send a spacecraft called Hera toward the Didymos asteroid system in 2024 to assess the impact of DART in greater detail.