NASA has employed the rocket-launch services of SpaceX for a daring asteroid redirection test in 2021. The critical mission will see SpaceX’s signature Falcon 9 rocket launch a NASA spacecraft towards a binary asteroid system 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth. The asteroid mission is dubbed the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART for short. NASA hopes DART will prove to be a successful way of protecting Earth from deep space dangers.