The American space agency NASA is planning to test out a method to prevent an asteroid impact by launching a non-explosive spacecraft into a nearby asteroid.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) and NASA will be jointly working on this mission. ESA has recently started the development of a non-explosive spacecraft, reported Discovery News.

But so far it seems that the mission will not be launched until 2022. The major goal of the mission will be to check if there are any plausible ways to eliminate other future threats from asteroids.

Collaboratively NASA and the ESA have already started their work on the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment mission.

The first phase project called the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM), in which the ESA will be sending a spacecraft in October 2020 to meet a binary asteroid system called ‘Didymos’.

AIM will also try to put a lander on the smaller of the two, which is the one NASA will later try to obliterate, Discovery News reported.

Later after two years, NASA will set the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in motion. Ian Carnelli, AIM mission manager at the ESA, said AIM will keep a close watch on DART when it will hit Didymoon.

Later, it will perform several detailed before-and-after comparisons on the structure of the body itself. It will also try to characterize DART's kinetic impact and its consequences.

“The results will allow laboratory impact models to be calibrated on a large-scale basis, to fully understand how an asteroid would react to this kind of energy”, Carnelli said.

Researchers hope that the mission will help them shed a light on the role the ejecta plume play.