Thanks BenLurkin. Looks like the ion drive will be used to push the satellite into the asteroidal moon, which will thereby be made to crash into the parent body. Using an ion drive directly attached to an asteroid would be an even better test, because anything that could threaten human survival would have to be taken apart by slamming a pretty large asteroid (probably one that is currently in retrograde orbit around the Sun), via a redirecting of its momentum. For perspective, an object about one mile in diameter would, upon impact on the also-moving Earth, release more energy than the simultaneous explosion of all the world's nuclear arsenals. To put that into some perspective, some nuclear weapons have, by themselves, more energy release than all the conventional armaments used during World War II.
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