And if all goes well, it might one day help humans safely land on Mars.
NASA’s Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) is designed to act as a drag device and slow down a hypersonic spacecraft as it enters the thin Martian atmosphere.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Engineers expect to lose contact with the private US moon lander Odysseus on Tuesday, cutting short the mission after its sideways touchdown last week.
NASA announced Tuesday that a $32.7 million Capstone spacecraft intended to try out a skewed lunar orbit had lost contact, but agency engineers are confident
