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Forecasters predict a 90% chance of good weather Wednesday night at Cape Canaveral for launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a fresh group of Starlink internet satellites.

A small NASA space probe blasted off from California early Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on a first-of-its-kind mission to change the orbit of an asteroid, pioneering a technique that may one day be used to divert an asteroid off of a collision course with Earth.

These photos show SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket standing on Space Launch Complex 4-East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, hours before liftoff with NASA’s DART mission, an experiment to test how a spacecraft might deflect a hazardous asteroid away from Earth.

A first-of-its-kind asteroid deflection experiment lifted off overnight from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. SpaceX launched NASA’s DART mission on a Falcon 9 rocket at 1:21 a.m. EST Wednesday (0621 GMT; 10:21 p.m. PST Tuesday) on a 10-month mission to collide with a near-Earth asteroid, proving a technique that could protect Earth from a future threat from space.