“The proposed mission, called AIDA (for ‘Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment’), would consist of a pair of spacecraft (sadly, not named Armageddon and Deep Impact) flung at the near-Earth asteroid 65803 Didymos. Didymos is actually a binary object consisting of a large primary mass and much smaller secondary satellite mass. The idea with the AIDA mission, which would take place near the end of 2022, is to accelerate a small kinetic impactor spacecraft to a relative velocity of 6.25 kilometers per second and crash it into the secondary Didymos mass. A second spacecraft would hold off a short distance away and measure the orbital deflection.”

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/european-space-agency-ponders-asteroid-smashing-mission/

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