‘Basically a bullseye’: Nasa crashes spacecraft into asteroid to test Earth’s defenses – as it happened

Space agency conducts Dart mission to learn whether asteroid's trajectory can be diverted away from Earth

Six minutes to impact on what is one of Nasa's coolest missions of recent history.

It has taken Dart 10 months and 470m miles to get here, since launch last year.

Usually Nasa spacecraft are intended to operate for many years, or even decades, but not Dart.

Dart was built to be destroyed. Dart is a mission of firsts, proving that a spacecraft can autonomously seek, find and approach a target in space that's so far away we don't even know what it looks like.