NASA has a team preparing a mission not explore space but to defend against it.
The team’s plan to avert a catastrophe is called the Double Asteroid Redirector Test aka DART, the Washington Post reports.
The team at Johns Hopkins University plans to launch a spacecraft, speed it up and smash it into an asteroid.
The mission is being touted as the first-ever test of a planetary defense system, Thrillist reports.
The Washington Post says the plan is for DART to reach speeds as fast as 15,000 miles per hour.
NASA will team up with the European Space Agency for the mission.
The team hopes the impact will bump the asteroid off course. The group is targeting the asteroid known as Didymos and a smaller rock that orbits it called Didymoon, according to Thrillist. The hope is to knock Didymoon in a different direction.
Thrillist reports Didymoon is about the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza. The publication says an asteroid, traveling at speeds of nearly 19 miles per second, could knock out an entire region of the globe.
However, Didymos or Didymoon are not threats to Earth. They'll both be 7 million miles away from the planet at their closest point, Thrillist reports.
NASA released a video rendering of the plan. The plan is to launch the probe in 2020 or 2021.
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