The Dart mission will test a technique for defending the Earth against hazardous space rocks.
We've all seen how Hollywood would do it, with brave astronauts and nuclear weapons. But how do you protect Earth from a killer asteroid for real?The thinking is you would only need to change the rock's velocity by a small amount to alter its path so that it misses Earth - provided you do it far enough in advance.
"This is the sort of thing, if you needed to, that you would do years in advance to just give the asteroid a small nudge to change its future position so that the Earth and the asteroid wouldn't be on a collision course," she told BBC News. Dart will be returning images to Earth at the rate of one per second as it heads towards its "deep impact". What at first will appear as a dot of light in the pictures will quickly grow to fill the entire field of view, before the feed then suddenly cuts out as the spacecraft is destroyed.
"LiciaCube will pass about three minutes after Dart's impact," said Simone Pirrotta from the Italian space agency .
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