From the threat of artificial intelligence taking over the world to governments admitting to the presence of UFOs, we seem to be living in an era when the wildest imaginings of science fiction have unexpectedly morphed into reality.

When the 1998 disaster movie Armageddon told the far-fetched story of a mission into space to destroy a meteor the size of Texas to prevent it from hitting Earth, few would have believed that a real planetary defence system would smash into an asteroid just over a couple of decades later.

The Hollywood blockbuster is riddled with scientific inaccuracies, but its central premise of creating an explosion to knock an asteroid off course played out in our solar system in September last year when Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully impacted the asteroid ‘moonlet’ Dimorphos.

It was the first-ever mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection by changing its motion in space – a so-called kinetic impactor....