A small spacecraft built for a NASA asteroid defense experiment arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California earlier this month and is ready for fueling, one of the final milestones before liftoff in November on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft arrived at Vandenberg on Oct.

The Falcon 9 rocket will accelerate the spacecraft away from Earth on a trajectory toward asteroid Didymos, a rocky object about a half-mile (780 meters) in diameter.

The primary science goal of the mission is to measure how the high-speed collision, which will destroy the DART spacecraft, disrupts the orbit of Dimorphos around nearby Didymos.

Engineers completed the initial testing on DART at Astrotech, and will fuel the spacecraft with hydrazine at the SpaceX facility.

The hydrazine will feed 12 small rocket thrusters on the DART spacecraft.

The rocket jets will be used for fine pointing of spacecraft during its 10-month flight to Didymos and Dimorphos.

The NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster-Commercial, or NEXT-C, thruster will adjust DART’s trajectory toward its asteroid target.

The DART mission was supposed to launch in July, but NASA announced earlier this year that the launch would slip to November due delays in delivering the spacecraft’s primary instrument and solar arrays.

NASA said the delay was caused by “technical challenges” associated with the spacecraft’s Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation, or DRACO, imaging system, which needed to be reinforced to ensure it can survive the stresses of a rocket launch.