Asteroid collisions are a favourite theme of Hollywood disaster movies — hitting the Earth with a cataclysmic impact or deflected at the last moment by heroic human intervention.
Now, new technology aimed at averting any future threat to the planet is being put to the test by Nasa scientists, who are preparing to smash a spacecraft into a faraway asteroid at 23,000kph in order to divert its path.
The existential threat from asteroids and comets, portrayed in films such as Armageddon and Don’t Look Up, has been recognised since scientists proved in the 1980s that a particularly large impact about 65mn years ago wiped out the dinosaurs.
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