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Yesterday (April 10) was a very good day for SpaceX.
The company's Falcon Heavy rocket aced its first-ever commercial mission, lofting the huge Arabsat-6A satellite communications and sticking three first-stage booster landings, one of them on a ship at sea.
And at about the same time this spaceflight action was going down, NASA announced that SpaceX will fly its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) planetary-defense mission. The total launch cost for NASA will be about $ 69 million, agency officials said.
Related: The Greatest Asteroid Encounters of All Time
If all goes according to plan, DART will launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in June 2021. In October 2022, the spacecraft will slam into "Didymoon," the 540-foot-wide (165 meters) satellite of the near-Earth asteroid Didymos.
Telescopes here on Earth will do document the collision of Didymoon and its orbit around the 2,540-foot-wide (775 m) Didymos. Such observations will help researchers assess the "kinetic impactor" strategy of dangerous-asteroid deflection, DART team members said.
And we can get some up-close looks at the batter Didymoon as well. AT candidate European mission called Hera It would have been inspecting the fresh crater and making detailed measurements of Didymoon's altered orbit, with the help of two briefcase-size cubesats.
It's still unclear if Hera will ever get off the ground, however. The European Space Agency is expected to decide the proposed mission by the end of the year.
DART will not be the first spacecraft to wallop an asteroid. Earlier this month, Japan Hayabusa2 probe smashed a copper cannonball into the space rock Ryugu, to unearth pristine subsurface material for study. Hayabusa2 may also collect some of this newly unearthed stuff, mission team members said.
Hayabusa2 is a sample-return mission. The probe has already snagged on Ryugu sample, which is scheduled to come to Earth in December 2020.
Mike Wall's book on the search for alien life, "Out There"(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom gold Facebook.
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