NASA working on Earth defense technology to destroy asteroids that could obliterate human civilization

The initiative, called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), is a refrigerator-sized aircraft designed to deliberately crash into a smaller component of the Didymos asteroid, a binary asteroid system slated to make a distant approach to Earth in October 2022, and then again in 2024. The asteroid system has been on NASA’s radar and was closely monitored since 2003. It is made up of two bodies: Didymos A that measures about half a mile in size, and Didymos B, which measures around 530 feet.