There's a real-life NASA mission in progress to change the course of an asteroid.

It's part of the double asteroid redirection test mission that launched in 2021.

And today, Monday, the craft will make contact with a celestial object that's not hurling towards Earth.

Thank goodness. It'll be a few weeks before we know if the redirect was successful.

And while we wait, we'll bring you NPR Science correspondent Nell Greenfield-Boys talking with Emily

Quang. They're talking about what it takes to pull off this mission and how it could potentially

protect the Earth in the future from killer space rocks. Don't worry, when NASA has the results

of this experiment, shortwave will bring Nell back to tell us all about it.

You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Quang here. So we know that in the past, rocks from outer space have

struck Earth and caused destruction, sometimes mass destruction. And the idea of having to deflect

an incoming asteroid is a staple of science fiction. It's what we call a global killer.

The end of mankind doesn't matter where it hits. Nothing would survive, not even bacteria.

That's a clip from the movie Armageddon. It came out the same year as the similarly themed yet

scientifically more plausible flick, deep impact. Now we get hit all the time by rocks and

meteors, some of them the size of cars, some no bigger than your hand. And then there's meteor from 1979.

It's five miles wide. It's traveling at a speed of 30,000 miles per hour. And there is no

place on Earth to hide. And these three movies all have something in common when it comes to how they

deal with this potential threat. And pier signs correspond at Nell Greenfield voices here. I'll

bet she knows what it is. I assume it's nukes, right? Nuclear weapons.

Yes, Hollywood's favorite counter strike. The nuke. Yeah, you know, Hollywood loves to go after

asteroids with nukes. But you know, if people really care about planetary defense, they say that

...