In the coming hours, the US space agency (NASA) will launch a probe at an asteroid as part of the Dart mission, to see how difficult it would be to stop a large space rock from hitting Earth.

The unusual event will occur about 11 million kilometers from Earth, in a celestial body known as Dimorphos, the BBC reports.

The agency notes that the rock is not currently on its way to hit Earth, and this test won't send it our way either.

The collision is set for 23:14 GMT and telescopes will be watching from afar, including the new James Webb Super Space Observatory.

Dart will send images to Earth at a rate of one image per second as it moves toward its target, and what will initially appear as a point of light in the images will quickly grow to fill the entire field of view, before the power to be suddenly cut off after the spacecraft was destroyed.

That's not the end of the story, however, as Dart carries a 14-kilogram Italian cubic clock with him, whose job it is to record what will happen when Dart digs into the crater.

Its images, taken from a safe distance of 50 km, will return to Earth in the coming days.