Spacecraft crash into asteroid at 15K mph is not self-indulgent NASA experiment, writes TOM LEONARD

One day in late September a box-shaped spacecraft weighing approximately half a ton will slam into an asteroid seven million miles away from Earth at a speed of 15,000mph, in a bid to knock it into a new orbit. This suicide mission by a craft the size of a golf cart is not just a self-indulgent experiment dreamed up by NASA scientists with money to burn. The very future of mankind could depend on its success because the $330 million (£269 million) Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART, for short) may well provide the answer to a problem that has preoccupied astronomers for centuries: what to do when an asteroid is on a collision course with our planet. 'This is a mission for planet Earth -- all the peoples of Earth -- because we would all be threatened,' said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who added that Dart has'turned science fiction into science fact'. Ever since the 1980s, when scientists first realised that the six-mile-wide Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula had been left by an asteroid whose impact triggered the mass destruction of all non-avian dinosaurs, Hollywood has latched on to the blockbuster potential of such a storyline. Films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact and, most recently, Don't Look Up, have all made millions at the Box Office by playing on our fear of an extinction-level event triggered by a planet-killing asteroid.