Watch Live: NASA probe attempts to alter asteroid's trajectory in planetary defense test

Monday night that will be the first real-world test of humanity's ability to nudge a threatening body off course before it could crash into Earth.

"At two and a half minutes before impact, SMART Nav, which is the autonomous algorithms that have brought us to that point, is going to turn off and we're just going to point the camera and take the most amazing pictures of this asteroid," said Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Transmissions will cease at the moment of impact. But because the collision will happen 7 million miles from Earth, the final few images will need 45 seconds or so to cross the gulf and make it into computers and onto NASA's live stream. A small Italian hitchhiker spacecraft known as LICIACube, released from DART earlier this month, will attempt to photograph the collision and the debris blasted back out into space. Those images will be stored on board and related back to Earth later.

Researchers expect the crash to shorten the asteroid's orbital period by about 10 minutes, but it could take a few days to weeks for telescopes around the world and in space, including the Hubble and James Webb space observatories, to make the measurements needed to nail down the number. "The second is a test of how the actual asteroid responds to the kinetic impact," he said."Because at the end of the day, the real question is, how effectively did we move the asteroid, and can this technique of kinetic impact be used in the future if we ever needed to?"

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