In 2024 the Hera mission will revisit the asteroid punched by NASA

The European House Company (ESA) is sending a mission to research what occurred to an asteroid that NASA punched in 2022. The Hera mission, launching in October, will head to asteroid Dimorphos, which NASA hit with its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

The objective of DART was to test whether or not smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid could be a great way to defend Earth ought to an asteroid ever be heading in our course. We all know that the impression shifted Dimorphos’ trajectory round its guardian asteroid, Didymos, shortening every orbit by about 33 minutes, however we don’t have particulars on how precisely that collision affected the asteroid or what occurred afterwards.

“We’d like one other spacecraft to return to the crime scene with the intention to inform whether or not the impression left a crater or fully reshaped the asteroid, as a result of with the present knowledge each eventualities are doable,” says Hera mission head Patrick Michel on the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France. “Hera is a detective that’s going to do a whole investigation of the impression.”

The mission consists of 1 predominant spacecraft, which is able to fly as shut as 1 kilometre to Dimorphos, and two tiny cube-shaped satellites supposed to land on its floor and test it out up shut. That investigation shall be essential to simulations of doubtless harmful asteroids and easy methods to deflect them sooner or later, however it would additionally present key scientific insights.

“Collisions play a key position in all of the photo voltaic system historical past – we began rising planets by collisions, all of the stable surfaces are populated with craters from collisions,” says Michel. “If we’re going to construct a whole mannequin of the collision historical past of the photo voltaic system, we have to perceive how these collisions work.” Hera will assist reveal how collisions work in house – and easy methods to make these collisions work for us.