Monday 26 September 2022 11:14 PM NASA's DART activates its camera to show the Didymos 6.8 million miles from ... trends now

NASA’s DART spacecraft has its sights set on the asteroid Dimorphos that appears like a bright dot in the blackness of space.

Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a box-shaped space probe, has activated its camera that will capture it crashing into the asteroid at 15,000 miles per hour at 7:14pm ET in an attempt to knock the space rock from its orbit.

Such a mission may evoke memories of a Hollywood disaster movie such as Armageddon, but this is very much real and is actually part of the US space agency's first ever planetary defense test.

The space probe will use what is called  kinetic impact, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an approaching near-earth object. 

The craft launched last November and is nearly to the end of its epic journey to the small asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger one called Didymos.

Didymos and Dimorphos are currently making their closest approach to Earth in years, passing at a distance of about 6.7 million miles from our planet.

Bill Nelson, NASA's administrator, said in a November interview that DART 'is something of a replay of Bruce Willis's movie, 'Armageddon,' although that was totally fictional.’

An asteroid the size of Dimorphos could cause a continent-wide destruction on Earth, while the impact of one the size of the larger Didymos would be felt worldwide.

NASA emphasizes that the asteroids in question pose no threat to our home planet, but were chosen because they can be observed from ground-based telescopes here on Earth.