A spacecraft is on its way to visit an asteroid that US space agency NASA knocked off course in 2022, writes BBC. The Hera craft launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 10:52 local time (15:52BST) on Monday. It is part of an international mission to see if we can stop dangerous asteroids hitting Earth.

The project will look at what happened to a space rock called Dimorphos when NASA intentionally collided with it. If all goes to plan, Hera will reach Dimorphos, around seven million miles away, in December 2026. The Hera mission, which is run by the European Space Agency, is a follow-on from NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) project.

Dimorphos is a small moon 160m-wide that orbits an asteroid close to Earth called Didymos in something called a binary asteroid system. In 2022 NASA said it successfully changed Dimorphos’s course by crashing a probe into it. It altered the rock’s path by a few metres, according to Nasa’s scientists. The asteroid was not on course to hit Earth, but it was a test to see whether space agencies could do it when there is genuine risk.

When it arrives in two years, the Hera craft will look at the size and depth of the impact crater created on Dimorphos. Two cube-shaped probes will also study the make-up of the asteroid and its mass.