Asteroids are out there and they could be a risk to us.
It’s up to NASA to find ways to stop them.
NASA is working on practice crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to save the planet. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test will try to divert the asteroid’s course.
Rice University's Space Institute's Director David Alexander said the asteroid is not a danger to Earth.
NASA's planetary defense goes up when there could be a collision from objects in space.
He said if an object heading to the Earth, NASA has to come up with a way to mitigate the impact or prevent it and this is one of the easiest methods.
"This is basically billiards, right? You're in the pool hall and you're just redirecting one of the balls and then hoping it doesn't hit the Earth," said Alexander.
He said it's worth trying, but they need to know all the dynamics.
"You kick it in a slightly different orbit. If you don't get it right, that could potentially cause problems in the future for the Earth, right. You can make sure that you've got all the orbital dynamics correct so that you're kicking it away from us and away from those in perpetuities, so it cannot come back 10, 20 years later," said Alexander.
He said there's many thousands of asteroids, but they don't cross orbits, aren't an immediate danger and are hard to detect.
Alexander said if NASA detected something headed towards our planet, they would have to detect it fairly far away, it's not something done at the last minute.
Reportedly, the defense system trial would take place as early as 2020.