Nasa has enlisted Elon Musk to help with its mission to save Earth from doomsday space rocks.

The space agency is currently working on a scheme called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which is aimed at discovering how to redirect asteroids.

It’s hoped that the project will allow Nasa to work out how to steer space objects onto a new trajectory.

When mastered, this technique could save millions or even billions of lives if an asteroid is seen to be on a collision course with Earth, because it will allow Nasa to simply push it onto a course which misses the planet rather than colliding with it.

Elon is literally helping to save humanity from space rocks (Image: Getty)

Nasa and Musk’s SpaceX will work together to test an ‘impactor craft’ which will smash into an asteroid and hopefully push it in a different direction.

SpaceX will launch the DART craft into space in June 2021 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

‘Nasa has selected SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, to provide launch services for the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the first-ever mission to demonstrate the capability to deflect an asteroid by colliding a spacecraft with it at high speed – a technique known as a kinetic impactor,’ Nasa wrote.

‘The total cost for NASA to launch DART is approximately $69 million, which includes the launch service and other mission related costs’.

‘The DART mission currently is targeted to launch in June 2021 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

‘By using solar electric propulsion, DART will intercept the asteroid Didymos’ small moon in October 2022, when the asteroid will be within 11 million kilometers of Earth.’

The plan involves hitting an 800m-wide asteroid known as Didymos in 2021 to attempt to alter its course.

Didymos isn’t on track to collide with Earth, but it is travelling at 13,500mph. If it hit us, it could trigger a mass extinction event by throwing dust into the atmosphere and blocking photosynthesis so that plants around the world die.

This would not be good for us (Image: Getty)

It’s called the double asteroid test because there’s a smaller orbiting body (called a ‘moonlet’) moving around it.

The moonlet is about 150m wide and Nasa plans to hit the smaller object when the two of them are about 11 million km from Earth. The idea is that the smaller body and Didymos itself will be deflected onto a new trajectory by the impact.

It’s basically a game of galactic snooker.

Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the DART team, told Space.com: ‘Planetary defence is really about the present solar system and what are we going to do in the present.

The DART plan will happen in 2021 (Image: Getty)

‘It’s interesting, because it’s a space mission, but the telescopes are such a huge, important part of the mission succeeding. We have to know where this moon is in order to impact it, to make this maximum deflection.

‘We kind of take for granted that we know where everything is at all times. We understand where the system is as a whole, but specifically where that moon’s gonna be [requires tracking] because we want to try to hit it head-on.

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‘To do something like this, we’d also need a really long warning time; the idea of a kinetic impactor is definitely not like [the film] ‘Armageddon,’ where you go up at the last hour and you know, save the Earth.’

‘This is something that you would do five, 10, 15, 20 years in advance – gently nudge the asteroid so it just sails merrily on its way and doesn’t impact the Earth.’