NASA

That's exactly what NASA did on Monday night when a spacecraft slammed into an asteroid and self-destructed.

However, planetary defence specialists assert that in practise, the best and safest response would be something more subtly done,

such as ramming a small spaceship into a potentially hazardous inbound space rock to simply push it off track.

The egg-shaped asteroid Dimorphos, which was seen in photographs transmitted as the impact approached,

increased in size from a blip on television to having its complete stony surface.

The impact was the result of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART),

a seven-year project that cost more than $300 million and launched a spacecraft in November 2021

 conduct the world's first test of planetary defence technologies.