NASA plans head-on collision between spaceship and asteroid

NASA is organizing a boxing match set among the stars.

In case an asteroid one day threatens Earth’s existence, NASA has developed a contingency plan: Punch that asteroid with a spaceship. The plan is already well into its demo phase. “Up until now, we haven’t had too many options for what we might do if we found something that was incoming,” Johns Hopkins planetary astronomer Andy Rivkin told Vice News of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. “DART is the first test of how we might be able to deflect something without having to resort to a nuclear package, or sitting in our basements, waiting it out and crossing our fingers.”