Amazing Rocket Launch To Light Up Marina Del Rey

HAWTHORNE, CA — A rare Southern California rocket launch Tuesday night may create a dazzling light spectacle visible across the region. It may also make human history.

Hawthorne-based SpaceX was slated to launch a NASA planetary-defense mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc along California's Central Coast.

The mission is a first for humankind. It's called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, intended to alter the trajectory of an asteroid moonlet, Dimorphos, by colliding with it at a speed of about 14,700 mph in the fall of 2022.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to launch at 10:21 p.m. Tuesday.

The mission is a test to see if an asteroid on a collision course with Earth can be diverted.

"The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, but this will change the orbital period of the moonlet by several minutes — enough to be observed and measured using telescopes on Earth," NASA said.

Dimorphos and Didymos pose no threat to Earth and are being targeted solely as a test mission of the redirection technology. The spacecraft's planned impact was expected to occur about 11 million kilometers, or roughly 6.8 million miles, from Earth.

"While no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years, only about 40% of those asteroids have been found as of October 2021," according to NASA's mission website.

The launch will be livestreamed on NASA's YouTube channel here.

Previous rocket launches from Vandenberg have created breathtaking light shows dazzling enough to stop traffic on the San Diego Freeway.

SpaceX launches can be impressive because the company brings the first stage of its Falcon 9 rockets back to Earth following separation from the spacecraft being launched into space.

If all goes according to plan, the DART spacecraft will slam into Didymos in September 2022. The impact should be close enough for scientists to observe the results with ground-based telescopes.

City News Service contributed to this report.