Hera will help us understand just how effective slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can be.
The mission will study the impact NASA’s DART mission had on an asteroid and its orbit around a larger asteroid.On Monday, the European Space Agency launched its Hera mission. This mission will get up close with the asteroid Dimorphos in an effort to study how effective NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test was.
To study DART’s effectiveness, Hera is headed for Didymos to see whether DART is viable. The ESA says Hera is about the size of a car. It launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It will take Hera two years to reach the binary asteroid system and it will need to perform a flyby of Mars to get extra oomph to make the journey.
“You can imagine a scenario where a reconnaissance mission is dispatched rapidly, to assess if any follow-up deflection action is needed. We should soon be practicing this again with our Ramses spacecraft, a proposed planetary defence mission to rendezvous with the Apophis asteroid during its close approach to Earth in 2029.”
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