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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.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, heading southeast over the Pacific Ocean with NASA’s DART asteroid deflection experiment. It will take 55 minutes to deploy the DART spacecraft on an Earth escape trajectory.

A small spacecraft set to launch on a collision course with an asteroid has been encapsulated inside the payload fairing of its Falcon 9 rocket for blastoff from California this week, a mission that will mark SpaceX’s first launch with a NASA solar system science probe.