DART approach
NASA's DART spacecraft is on track to deliberately collide with a small moon of a near Earth asteroid Sept. 26, an impact that will be observed by an Italian cubesat, LICIACube (lower right) that will fly by the asteroids.

A NASA spacecraft is on course to deliberately collide with a small asteroid Sept. 26 to test how that technique could be used to deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...