Hazardous asteroids pose a risk to life on Earth, but it's difficult to track dangerous asteroids, and harder yet to divert catastrophe if one is found to be careening toward Earth.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will test one method for deflecting killer space rocks. The spacecraft should travel to a pair of asteroids called Didymos (which pose no threat to Earth) to demonstrate what NASA calls the "kinetic impactor" technique.

That simply means that DART will crash head-on into the smaller asteroid, which is about 525 feet wide, in order to push it into a closer orbit around the larger asteroid.

The Mission: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/