COSMIC BOWLING

Video: NASA Launches ‘Armageddon’ Spacecraft That Will Smash Into Asteroid

Its mission is to slam into an asteroid to test whether it’s possible to change the course of a space rock.

NASA has launched a spacecraft to test out technology that could one day save us all from oblivion. The DART spacecraft—or Double Asteroid Redirection Test— blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base early on Wednesday morning. Its mission is to slam into an asteroid to test whether it’s possible to change the course of a space rock if one is ever hurtling toward Earth. If everything goes to plan, DART will hit the 525 foot-wide Dimorphos asteroid at 15,000 mph some time next September. “This isn’t going to destroy the asteroid. It’s just going to give it a small nudge,” said mission official Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, according to The Washington Post. The mission has been compared to the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon, in which a rag-tag group of drillers are sent to space to knock an asteroid off its collision course with Earth.