NASA will smash its DART spacecraft into an asteroid on Monday. Here's how to watch.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test will be the first ever test of humankind's ability to dodge asteroids before they hit Earth.

The DART craft, a squat cube-shaped probe consisting of sensors, an antenna, an ion thruster and two 28-foot-long solar array, will smash into the asteroid Dimorphos.

The aim of the probe's test is to slow the Dimorphos around Didymos, which is 1,280 feet wide. Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth as they are more than 7 million miles from our planet at the time of DART's impact, but NASA scientists want to use the test to study how a more dangerous asteroid might one day be hit by a vehicle. DART will hit Dimorphos at 7:14 pm. Live coverage is scheduled to start at 6 p.m. on Monday. There is a show on NASA television.

What happened when the asteroid hit?

Tom Statler, a scientist working at NASA's planetary defense team, said at a Sept. 12 news briefing that the DART mission will attempt to change the motion of an asteroid. It will be a landmark moment for the world.

DART began its journey to Didymos and Dimorphos 10 months ago, but its roots can be traced back a long way. The asteroid-bumping test was proposed by scientists at the European Space Agency in the early 2000s. The quixotic mission wasn't finished. The Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) was a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. The first to collide with Dimorphos on Monday was split into NASA's DART and the Hera missions.

Scientists think the test will bring Dimorphos to a close with Didymos. If the mission slows Dimorphos' 12 hour flight down by 73 seconds, it will be considered a success, but the real change will be less.

The DART craft's onboard cameras will only be able to take second-by-second images of the last moments before it smashes into Dimorphos. The Italian Space Agency's LICIACube will be used to get a better view of the outcome. The LICIACube will take pictures of the aftermath of the collision at a distance of 55 km.

There will be an impact that will change the trajectory, there will be a crater formed, and after that there will be ejecta that will travel through space.

The impact will be witnessed by some telescopes on the ground, as well as the agency's Lucy spaceship. Scientists want to understand how much force is needed to divert an asteroid.

The National Space Administration of China is in the early stages of planning an asteroid-redirect mission. The Long March 5 rockets will be used to hit the asteroid Bennu.

The threat of a potential impact is more than 150 years away, but Bennu is not as benign as Didymos and Dimorphos. Between 2175 and 2199, the 85.5-million-ton (77.5 million metric tons) space rock is on the verge of swooping within 4.5 million miles of Earth's equator. The space rock is as wide as the Empire State Building, meaning that if it hit the Earth it would cause huge waves and kill millions.

The energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima is 80,000 times greater than the energy of Bennu. The space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs had 100 million megaton of energy.

Lindley Johnson, the Director of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, told the New York Times that a half kilometer-sized object is going to create a crater that's at least five kilometers in diameter. The area of destruction is going to be much larger than the crater. An object of Bennu's size impacting on the eastern seaboard states would be devastating.

It was originally published on Live Science