By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters -A NASA spacecraft was launched late on Tuesday in California to show the first planetary defense system. It is intended to protect Earth from an asteroid.

DART’s spacecraft was launched into the night skies at 10.21 pm Pacific on Tuesday (0621 GMT Wednesday). It was carried by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg U.S. Space Force Base. The base is about 150 miles north of Los Angeles.

NASA TV aired the launch live.

DART, a payload about the same size as a car, was launched from the booster just minutes after launch. This allowed the DART payload to be released from its booster and begin the 10-month journey into deepspace, approximately 6.8M miles (11km) away from Earth.

DART will then test its capability to change an asteroid’s trajectory using sheer kinetic force. DART will drive into the space rock at high speed in order to push it off track just enough to save our planet.

A camera mounted on the Impactor and on the mini-spacecraft of briefcase size to be released by DART 10 days before the collision, will capture the moment and beam images back to Earth.

DART, the asteroid targeted at is not a threat to Earth and it is small in comparison with Chicxulub the asteroid which struck Earth 66,000,000 years ago. This caused the extinction of dinosaurs. However, scientists believe smaller asteroids will be more prevalent and present a higher theoretical risk in the short term.

DART’s target for DART is an asteroid called “moonlet”, which orbits a rock chunk five times as large in Didymos (the Greek term for twin).

DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. The Didymos system was chosen by the DART team because of its proximity to Earth, dual-asteroid configuration, and ability to observe the effects of impact.

BUMPING ASTEROID MOONLET

Plan is for the DART spacecraft to be flown directly to Dimorphos moonlet at 15,000 miles an hour (24,000 KPH), bumping hard enough to cause it to track the larger asteroid.

A camera on the spacecraft and on its impactor will capture the collision. Earth-beam images of the image are captured by the cameras. Ground-based telescopes measure the amount of Didymos’s orbital changes.

DART Team expects Dimorphos’ orbital track to be shorter by 10 minutes. However, they consider at least 73 seconds as a success. To safely reroute the asteroid, a slight push on an asteroid thousands of miles distant would suffice.

DART, the latest mission of NASA to interact and explore asteroids is one of many recent NASA missions. It was launched in the last year.

NASA has launched last month a probe that will travel to Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting close to Jupiter. The grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRES -REx, which carries a sample taken from Bennu last October, is now on its way back home to Earth.

Dimorphos moonlet, one of the most tiny astronomical objects ever to be given a permanent name, is among 27,500 near-Earth asteroids that NASA has tracked.

NASA believes that many other asteroids are still unknown in the vicinity of Earth, even though none pose a danger to humanity.

DART, a cube-shaped spacecraft with two rectangular solar arrays and one square antenna, will rendezvous with Didymos/Dimorphos in September 2022.

NASA estimated the total cost of DART at $330 Million, which is well under the amount of space agencies’ most ambitious science missions.