Elon Musk trolls NASA with picture of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock

Tesla founder and billionaire trolled the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with a picture of Hollywood actor Will Smith slapping his colleague Chris Rock.

Leaving it up to Twitter users for a caption, the Tesla chief did not provide one. It has so far gained more than 430,000 likes and over 35,000 retweets.

Musk's tweet referred to NASA's DART spacecraft successfully slamming into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed this Monday in the world's first test of a planetary defence system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth.

Humanity's first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations centre outside Washington, DC, 10 months after DART was launched.

Smit had slapped Rock after his joke at the Oscars, which involved comparing the actor's shaven-haired wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, to GI Jane. It remains unclear whether Rock was unaware of Pinkett Smith’s alopecia diagnosis.