A NASA spacecraft will crash into an asteroid on Monday as part of its Dart mission to see how difficult it would be to stop a sizeable space rock from hitting Earth.

The action will take place some 11 million km away (7 million miles) on a target called Dimorphos. The rock is not currently on a path to hit the Earth, the agency said. The spacecraft has an autonomous guidance system on board that will be in charge of guiding DART to Dimorphos.

The new super space observatory James Webb will be watching the impact scheduled for 7:14PM ET. However, NASA will begin its coverage of the DART impact at 6 PM ET on Monday, September 26.

“That is a very ‘sweaty’ time for us. The spacecraft is so far away that it takes 38 seconds for one-way communication. It will be travelling at a speed of 6 kilometres per second. It is going at a speed that will cover the distance between DC and Philadelphia in about 40 seconds,” Evan Smith, deputy mission systems engineer for DART, said during a NASA press conference on September 12.

Also Read | NASA’s DART mission: A timeline

When was the last time an asteroid hit earth?

In March, astronomer Krisztian Sarneczky noticed an asteroid at the Piszkéstető Observatory in Hungary. The asteroid around the size of a refrigerator was spotted hours before it hit Earth’s atmosphere.

But, the asteroid, named 2022 EB5, did not pose any threat due to its size, NASA said in a statement at the time. The incident marked the fifth time in history an asteroid was detected right before hitting our planet. 

While no meteorites from the asteroid were recovered, according to the International Meteor Organization, some people in Iceland reported seeing bright flashes, indicating the space rock became a fireball.

Also Read | NASA’s DART mission: Why is planetary defense important?

Meanwhile, NASA said last year that the most significant fireball event in over 100 years occurred over Russia in 2013. The asteroid, according to NASA, was the size of a small building. It disintegrated about 20 kilometers above the city of Chelyabinsk.

The event deposited a number of meteorites on the ground.