An Irish professor involved in a NASA mission which saw a spacecraft deliberately crashed into an asteroid said technology can prevent a small asteroid hitting Earth.
Ten months after launch, NASA's asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft neared a planned impact with its target on Monday in a test of the world's first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth.
The cube-shaped "impactor" vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos, about as large as a football stadium, and self-destruct around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) some 6.8
million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
