A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks.

The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 was due to fly within 800 meters (0.5 miles) of asteroid Torifune, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists said earlier, a trial run to see whether such a probe could deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth.

The mission comes after NASA deliberately smashed a spacecraft into the 160-meter-wide (525-foot-wide) Dimorphos asteroid in 2022, successfully altering its orbit around a larger space rock.