Houston, we have impact

NASA is performing an experiment later today that – just like the Incredible Hulk – has one mandate, and one mandate only: smash.

At approximately 7:14 pm ET, a custom spacecraft will crash into a binary asteroid, called Didymos, about seven million miles away from Earth.

🛰💥 Background: This is all part of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which aims to determine how effective a guided crash is at diverting a potential impact on Earth. Asteroids are immensely powerful, with the ability to alter the course of all living things – just ask the dinosaurs.

But to get more recent, a growing group of scientists theorize an asteroid hit Earth ~12,800 years ago. And the result was right out of a George Martin book: fire + ice.

• The impact reportedly incinerated ~10% of the Earth’s entire biomass, due to the asteroid launching burning ejectorate that caused widespread wildfires.
• The ice caps at the North Pole were instantly liquidized as well, creating a tsunami wave ~1,000 feet tall that flooded an area the size of Europe and China combined.

And if that wasn’t enough, debris from the impact combined with ash from the fires to block out the Sun completely, sending the planet into a 1,200-year Ice Age.

So yeah… avoiding that is kind of a big deal.

+In the know: Today’s head-on impact – between a roughly 600-foot-wide asteroid and 1,300-pound spacecraft traveling at 10,000+ MPH – will produce the estimated energy equivalent of around three tons of TNT. Watch it live.