Hera’s goal is to determine whether Earth can be spared from asteroid collisions in the future.
compact, The compact car-sized probe is headed to two asteroids that are located 195 million kilometers from Earth. Two years ago, NASA purposefully crashed a spacecraft into one of these asteroids.
As part of a partnership with NASA, ESA is working to create cutting-edge technology that will shield Earth from a devastating asteroid strike.
“The risk of an asteroid hitting our planet affects everyone everywhere, making planetary defence an inherently international endeavour,” said Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA.
NASA’s DART mission purposefully collided with the 151-meter-wide asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022.
Its objective was to determine whether ramming an asteroid with a space probe the size of a vending machine would be adequate to push it away from Earth and prevent a direct strike.
The target binary asteroid is called Didymos, and Dimorphos is the moon of this larger asteroid.
It was expected the smaller asteroid would remain in its parent’s gravitational pull, eliminating the possibility of a future collision with Earth even if the prang with DART proved unpredictable.
The impact of the DART spacecraft altered Dimorphos’s orbit around Didymos by approximately 32 minutes, a deviation 26 times greater than the minimum predicted by NASA scientists.
