Solving Asteroid Mysteries | Europe's Hera Planetary Defense Mission
There is a mystery out there in deep space—and solving it will make Earth safer. This is why the European Space Agency’s Hera Mission is taking shape—to go where one particular spacecraft has gone before.
On September 26, 2022, moving at 6.1 km/s, NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into the Dimorphos asteroid. Part of our Solar System changed. The impact shrunk the orbit of the Great Pyramid-sized Dimorphos around its parent asteroid, the mountain-sized Didymos.
This grand experiment was performed to prove we could defend Earth against an incoming asteroid, by striking it with a spacecraft to deflect it. DART succeeded. However, it still leaves many things scientists do not know: What is the precise mass and makeup of Dimorphos? What did the impact do to the asteroid? How large is the crater left by DART’s collision? Or has Dimorphos completely cracked apart, to be held together only by its own weak gravity?
This is why we are going back with the European Space Agency’s Hera Mission. The spacecraft will revisit Dimorphos to gather vital close-up data about the deflected body, to turn DART’s grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique.
The mission will also perform the most detailed exploration yet of a binary asteroid system—although binaries make up 15% of all known asteroids, one has never been surveyed in detail.
Hera will also perform technology demonstration experiments, including the deployment of the European Space Agency’s first deep space ‘CubeSats’—shoebox-sized spacecraft to venture closer than the main mission then eventually land—and an ambitious test of 'self-driving' for the main spacecraft, based on vision-based navigation.
By the end of Hera’s observations, Dimorphos will become the best studied asteroid in history. This is vital, because if a body of this size ever struck Earth it could destroy an entire city. The dinosaurs had no defence against asteroids, because they "never had a space agency." However, through Hera, we are teaching ourselves what we can do to reduce this hazard and make our space environment safer.
Learn more about the Hera Mission:
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Hera
Video Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Duration: 3 minutes
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